One of the things we constantly do with our clients is attempt to answer the questions that the top performing competitors can answer today. For example, the best performing marketing departments can answer this question:

How do the best companies identify, qualify, measure and build a digital relationship with prospects before they're willing to talk to a salesperson?

Today a Hidden Sales Cycle has developed whereby prospects spend 50-90% of their buying journey researching online on their own before reaching out to a sales person. Keeping in mind that 63% of companies that are surpassing their competitors use integrated marketing automation, we've identified and streamlined five basic core methods that you'll want to apply to your strategy in order to best nurture leads and prospects before they’re willing to talk to a salesperson.

User experience design for ecommerce over the past several years has honed in on the big question that companies have seen as critical to driving online sales revenue: how do you expedite the buying process?

High quality, experiential lifestyle content is a must for selling to affluents, especially in the real estate vertical

Having worked with the affluent and super-affluent segments for luxury real estate clients including Kiawah Island, Christophe Harbour St Kitts, and The Cliffs, we’ve been at the forefront of the changing landscape of how affluents use the web and web-based devices.

A special thanks to the team at Converge SE for including Bob and myself in the amazing lineup of speakers and everyone who attended our workshop for their kind words, great questions, comments and tweets. We have posted our slides and welcome everyone's feedback and questions.

The project has started and you sit down and break out the trusty moleskin. It's filled with random sketches, notes, and the logo ideas from the last branding meeting. You are ripe with ideas for the new logo, UI, or layout and it feels only natural that as a designer you go to what you know best- even though we are getting ahead of ourselves because we have left out a very important step, the creative brief.

Yes, the creative brief comes first. No, it's not the sexiest part of the project and no, you don't get to use photoshop or fireworks. But, by doing the creative brief, you will be able to better communicate with the client upfront in a language they understand before throwing out designer speak such as white space, typography, or color theory.