Stay Above The Line With Your Marketing

I was out on Friday evening with my good friend and trusted business advisor Jarrod Stanton from ActionCOACH.  Jarrod is a local Calgary business coach and works with a great team of other ActionCOACH business coaches.  Their team is completely focused on helping and serving the Calgary business community succeed and make a huge impact.

Not only is Jarrod a great friend, he is a neighbour as well.

Also joining us for an evening business meeting was Frank Allen.  Frank is the voice behind the Humble Warrior blog here in Calgary.  Frank shares some great stuff about others in this blog of his.  Frank has really taken the Go Giver model and ran with it.

We got chatting about a number of topics that impact business in Calgary and across Canada.  Ulistic is really looking forward to working with the entire ActionCOACH team over the next little  and figuring out how we can help our clients more than what we are now.  I think we have a plan.

Back to our chat over Montana’s nachos. We got talking about marketing and the continued importance of staying above the line in your business, sales and marketing.  I have always tried to stay well above the line with marketing but sometimes I slip below and end up bad mouthing someone or something.  It usually comes back to bite me in the butt and bite me really hard.  Insert my “stable networking” behaviour from early 2009 and some other examples.

But one thing I would never ever do is bad mouth or even attempt to steal away business by mentioning a competitor on my website. I stumbled upon a great example tonight that really hit home, especially after our talk.  One of the websites Ulistic runs focuses on the Managed IT services community and shares MSP Marketing tips and tricks.

Well tonight, I found one of our (respected) peers websites who in my opinion has gone below the line.

They are openly stating that Managed Service Providers need to switch to their solution from another leading MSP Internet Marketing solution.

I don’t know…it doesn’t sit well with me…but you be the judge.

I don’t know guys…it is something that I just wouldn’t do, especially on my website.  I know the guys at Kutenda (not well) and they appear to be a group of pretty smart online marketing professionals.  Sure some of their services overlap what we are doing in the MSP community with Ulistic, but I just couldn’t lower myself to openly attempt to steal clients of theirs on my website.

What happened to focusing on your strengths and values?