The future success of your business depends on your ability to perform meaningful market research. Does this come as a surprise? It shouldn’t. Market research allows you to:

• Measure customer satisfaction
• Make your marketing more efficient
• Find new customers
• Develop a customer-centric product development cycle

Assuming that you are selling a useful good or service, knowing any or all of the bullet points above would be considered useful by most business people.

A study done by an Australian research group discovered that firms that had strong market research capabilities had greater sales growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and new product success rates were firms that had significantly greater market research abilities (Vorhies, Harker, Rao 1999). Continue reading →

Forbes has our Back.

Well… they don’t literally have our back, but we are preaching mostly the same thing. In a recent article by Larry Light, marketing is portrayed as one of the most important business functions that on many levels is not managed like a business function.

Mr. Light proposes that marketing is run like a trade. What he means by this is that marketers are becoming increasingly specialized. This is to the point that marketers in a particular specialty our unable to see the marketing and organizational big pictures and see their methodology, theory, or technology as the only true way to market things. They become disconnected from the organization they are a part or servicing.

Mr. Light feels that this trend is devaluing marketing. We completely agree with this notion.

We feel that all marketing strategies should be composed of the right tactical mix of many marketing tactics (trades). We also strive to help our clients understand how marketing is directly integrated with their key performance metrics (profit, sales volume, lead conversion). Continue reading →

Today Serfwerks announced that it is set to unveil a series of marketing training for marketing professionals, executives, entrepreneurs and business owners. Focusing on several different components of the marketing function, the training will consist of a series of workshops focused on helping businesses achieve significantly improved marketing results. The workshops will include subjects such as marketing metrics, the 360º Environmental Analysis (internal, customers, competition, etc.), go-to-market strategy development, marketing performance evaluation, and campaign optimization among others.

Serfwerks is also pleased to announce that it will be partnering with Sales Sigma Consulting to provide a workshop series that will help the marketing & sales functions improve the integration of their disparate processes to deliver improved marketing & sales results. Topics will include the organizational alignment, performance management, understanding your ideal customer criteria, and more.

The workshops will be delivered at various locations throughout the Salt Lake metro area. The workshops will also include a series that can be customized and delivered to an individual organization.

“The new training products represent a huge step forward for Serfwerks,” said Nate Gibby, Serfwerks’ co-founder and director of marketing services. “They will provide small to medium-sized business with the marketing strategies, practices and tools that were previously available only to big business with large, sophisticated marketing departments and technologies.”

More information about Serfwerks’ marketing training services will be released soon. In the mean time, those interested can sign up for more information.

Marketing is an art. Good marketing is a science. Great marketing is an art AND a science.

Many marketers gravitated towards, or stumbled into, the discipline because of an interest in the artistic, visual, or communications-related topics in school as opposed to the core sciences. Not many marketing professionals, even at high levels, have formal training in analytics or statistics (the math behind the magic).

Great marketing has to be both artistic and scientific. Creativity without science is guessing, and only works for the extremely lucky. Science without the creativity is boring and can’t engage an audience… which is critical in the digital age where we are constantly bombarded by information. Only the unique or the personal or the relevant is retained, shared, and acted upon.

The Problem

Even though the internet and search engines have provided new ways of measuring the effect of marketing efforts more accurately, and targeting specific audiences more directly, many marketers still do not know how to use these tools, nor what to do with the metrics if/when they gather them. Continue reading →

Serfwerks will be teaching the strategic marketing workshop through the Small Business Development Center at Utah Valley University on Thursday, May 6 2010. Continue reading →

Motivation is hard to quantify. It is not a tangible thing. Motivation does not make a sound, it does not hurt when it hits you in the head, and it cannot be measured with a ruler. Motivation is just a way of describing what drives us to do things. Sometimes the thing that drives us to do things is physiological – this is what drives us to want to eat and drink. But, what drives us to exhibit consumer behavior, buying stuff, can usually be explained as motivation. So, what motivates us to buy stuff?

Motivation is complicated, however motivational theory models do exist and they can be used to predict behavior. One that I subscribe to in particular is the Expectancy Theory of Motivation.

The theory itself is a little complex and has countless uses in defining motivation. From this theory we can glean that people are motivated to do things in order to achieve outcomes based on the desirability and probability of achieving those outcomes. Continue reading →

In a study of about 500 first year sales reps: 60% reported setting no goals; 32% reported setting general earnings goals; and 8% reported setting specific annual earnings goals. Of those surveyed – those that set general goals were 2 times more successful than those that set no goals and those that set specific goals were three times more successful (Hall 2003).

Good goals are tremendous motivators. Basic motivational theory states that basic motivation is composed of two parts: direction and intensity. Good goals do this. But what are good goals? Good goals are SMART goals. Continue reading →

For too long, marketing has remained the last great business function to be driven by gut feelings and random experimentation. In an effort to change this, Serfwerks has partnered with Sales Sigma Consulting to develop a longitudinal study to looking at various marketing and sales strategies and techniques. The study will help provide a body of data that marketers and sales professionals alike may use to make better decisions in regard to their sales & marketing practices. All are invited to participate in the survey.

Take the survey now.

Serfwerks announced today that it has launched the new web site for Las Vegas-based Par 4 Golf Management. The new site promotes the golf courses operated by Par 4. It also contains a section featuring Par 4’s innovative approach to performance-based management of golf courses.

Par 4 Golf Management operates golf courses in Nevada, California and Oklahoma.

Library World, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of online library collection management services, has contracted with Serfwerks to develop a logo and brochure to be used in the development of a new product line. The details of the new product line have yet to be released.