by Karl Sakas on October 20, 2011
Rocky Mountaineer tourist train in Canada
If you want to travel by train in western Canada but you want a memorable experience instead of a mere rolling seat, you’ll probably take the award-winning Rocky Mountaineer tourist train between Vancouver, Whistler, Banff, and Calgary.
After a rough startup 21 years ago, the company has grown to become the “busiest privately owned passenger rail service in North America, having transported over one million passengers since 1990.”
4 Marketing and Client Service Ideas from the Rocky Mountaineer
As a marketer and train enthusiast, I took four key business insights from Trip of a Lifetime by Paul Grescoe, a corporate history of the Rocky Mountaineer:
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by Karl Sakas on October 8, 2011
I recently provided feedback on a friend’s boyfriend’s resume, as he applied for new jobs as a quality assurance (QA) manager and software project manager. My feedback for him applies to a lot of resumes I’ve seen as a hiring manager, so I wanted to share my [edited and anonymized] list here. Take a look at your resume and see if you’re making some of these mistakes yourself.
To be clear, this checklist won’t help if you have no experience to speak of. And it will definitely take you longer than 60 minutes if you need time to wordsmith each bullet point. But if you have a “C-” resume, I bet you can take it to a “B+” in just an hour.
Pros and cons: Reviewing a QA Manager’s resume
First, the strengths. He had lots of experience, including working with business stakeholders (not always true for technical people). He’d also worked on a variety of projects, using a variety of programming languages, which suggests he’s versatile and can learn quickly. Finally, from looking at a job posting he was considering, he had almost all of the “preferred” skills a company wants. Perfect.
But then the weaknesses. His three-page resume was dense and hard to understand. He listed a lot of responsibilities, without quantifying the results of his actions. He wasn’t getting many interviews, especially as he looked to relocate to Raleigh.
What to change in his resume (and maybe your resume!)
To get more interviews, I recommended he make some significant revisions — and you can use this as your checklist, too: [click to continue…]
by Karl Sakas on October 2, 2011
Signing a lease... aka an annual retainer.
I’m always looking for ideas on how to provide better client service at my marketing agency, no matter the source — like a continuing ed workshop in Raleigh by the editor of MrLandlord.com. Jeffrey Taylor helps property managers improve their apartment rental businesses, but his client-relations advice easily applies to doing account services at your marketing agency.
Why Great Tenants are Like Marketing Agency Clients
If you think about it, apartment tenants are like an agency’s retainer clients, and lease agreements are a lot like marketing retainers — we provide a certain level of service for a monthly price. And our goal is to keep them as a happy client for as long as possible, to help them get results and to maximize Lifetime Customer Value (LCV).
Jeffrey Taylor’s TREIA workshop was called ”How to Fill Any Vacancy in 72 Hours for Top Market Rent, in a Competitive Market.” Which — speaking of marketing — is an irresistible title for his target market. He’s given over 1,000 presentations, and it showed. He had great content, with a ton of audience interaction — and there wasn’t a single PowerPoint slide.
Top 10 MrLandlord.com Tips, for Apartments… or Client Service
With an eye for always improving my client service skills, I identified 10 top tips that I can apply at work: [click to continue…]
by Karl Sakas on September 26, 2011
Phil Buckley wrote a marketing blog article in response to my question at a recent Raleigh SEO Meetup — “Is SEO now moving at such a fast pace that normal small business owners should just hire a professional?” If you decide to take the self-serve SEO plunge, he recommends resources like the SEOmoz blog, blogger Lisa Barone, Google’s Webmaster Channel, and the Google Webmaster Forums.
If you don’t want to become an SEO expert on top of running your business, I don’t blame you — as one of my clients (a dentist) says, “I just want to work on teeth!” But just as you should know about about taxes to oversee your CPA, you should learn enough about search engine optimization to evaluate and hire a good SEO consultant.
8 Interview Questions to Ask SEO and Online Marketing Agencies
In my experience, here are some important questions to ask prospective SEO agencies, if you’re considering hiring one (disclosure: I work for an SEO agency in Raleigh, NC): [click to continue…]
by Karl Sakas on September 8, 2011
