The marketing and communications world is constantly changing as new brands hit the market and old ones hit the trash can. More new brands are launched each year than ever before, and more brands tank as well.

Successful strategic marketers and media companies understand these dynamics and are constantly searching and monitoring their impacts. Often they use million bit statistical tools that harness greater world wide web stats including video uploads and downloads, photos that pull the best and least and themes that score the highest sharing among tens of thousands social media sites they are monitoring.

What is happening to us? If we’re not careful, and now I’m referring to those of you at the helm of a small to mid-size organization, you can easily end up spending most of your time searching for the next big thing and get lost in the details. Making this particularly difficult is that the world has become so entertainment focused the less traversed roads of business to business topics are becoming more difficult to identify.

Or, you might consider spending your time learning what matters most to your key customers and prospects. I would suggest that this is a more fruitful way to spend your time and to drive a substantial return on your investment of time – and resources.

To overcome these inherent difficulties there are three questions you can use to jumpstart your “learning program”:

  1. What makes my current customers want to buy from me?
  2. When is the best time to meet with key prospects in my call list?
  3. Who are my key prospects that are moving closer to a closed sale, and which ones aren’t going anywhere?

When planning strategic communications, you should always keep in mind that the Internet has provided prospects with a sense of empowerment they lacked just 10 years ago. This hasn’t made things simpler, rather, it’s complicated the discussion. Often, armed with a host of incorrect ideas prospects fool themselves into thinking they know far more than they do. Your challenge, should you decided to accept it, is to lead them to a more accurate view of the business market they work in and help them understand you have a solution they truly need.