Marketing and Sales Archives - James L. Walpole

Introducing the How To Be Anything Show

Haven’t you wondered about what it would be like to drop your career and try something different? Didn’t you have a bunch of things you “wanted to be when you grew up” that you haven’t tried (yet)? I can answer “yes.” In addition to all of the skills dabbling and multi-hat-wearing I already do, I […]

The Adventure of Enterprise Software: Salesforce, Mascots, and the Heroic Customer

Is your software cumbersome and complicated? Does it require months of training to use and years of experience to master? Make the challenges into an adventure. Salesforce does. If you’re not a sales or marketing person, you should know that Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management software. Being #1 doesn’t mean it’s the easiest to use […]

4 Low-Cost Hacks for Better Event Tabling

Conference marketing has become a bit uninspired over the years. Companies tabling at events will collect business cards for generic giveaways, ask people to sign up for generic email lists, and give away branded promotional items. It’s boring, and it’s not clear that it’s effective. As I do more work in the event marketing space, […]

The Salesperson’s Workout Routine

(This is not a serious post. A colleague of mine in sales complained about the difficulty of opening our office door today, so I informed him my new workout routine for salespeople would become the subject of today’s blog. He’s a good sport 😉 ) Suffering from the lethargy and poor fitness of the modern […]

Ideas for Leveling Up Your Marketing Team: #1 – Share (Almost) Everything You’re Doing

Being questioned is hard. When other departments or employees in a company start to question our marketing teams, a natural response is to curl up into defensiveness mode. We assume that other teams just don’t understand us or our brilliant plans, and consequently we further block the flow of information about what we’re doing. This is […]

One Simple Change To Improve Your Presentation and Slide Deck Design

Most presentation decks look awful, and no one knows what to do with that fact. We’ve had Powerpoint now for almost two decades (?) and most of us still don’t know how to make clean, simple, well-designed presentations. Even one of the world’s richest men apparently can’t pay someone to get it right for him: […]

3 Ways To Get More Value From Facebook In a Few Minutes a Day

If you’re like me, you don’t like having your life sucked away. In other words, you don’t like spending a lot of time on Facebook, even if your compulsive FOMO draws you back from time to time. If you’re smart, you’ve already eliminated your Facebook newsfeed. But if you’re really being honest, you know that completely […]

Sales Is My Favorite Spectator Sport

I enjoy being sold to. Weird, right? I think the art of selling is a beautiful thing to watch if it is done well, a pathetic thing to watch if done poorly, and an admirable thing to watch if attempted with verve. It’s becoming a spectator sport for me. Selling something – a dangerous idea, a […]