Revenue Journal®

Email has become the message medium of our age. Just as we learned how to address and stamp an envelope, just as we learned how to fill out a FedEx form, we are now - still - learning how to use email effectively to run our businesses, and to buy and sell products and services.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time this week talking about how frustrating it is when someone doesn't do what I'm about to recommend. Suffice it to say that stream-of-consciousness, flaky subject lines don't help you manage your business or increase your revenues.

What is really happening - and we all know this, because we are experiencing it every day - is all activities, and all communication about activities, happen via email. It's become the central communication tool for all projects.

Your brand is the promise that you keep, not the one you make. This is my take on branding, which I first wrote in 1994 to help CEOs and entrepreneurs understand that they have direct control over their brand, using the five promise-keeping tools at their disposal: people, products, policies, projects, and processes.

When I work with CEOs and entrepreneurs, I find that their products are usually competitive. Their people are usually intelligent, hard-working, and well-intentioned. Their policies are usually OK - assuming the head of the company is not a jerk.

Given that most companies have decent products, people and policies, that leaves the other two resources: projects and processes. Many companies choose the wrong projects or manage them poorly. Even more companies have weak, dysfunctional, or even abysmal processes.

If you'd like the Revenue Journal delivered automatically to you - thus saving you the "mental overhead" of visiting yet another bookmark or favorite - you'll want to use an RSS feed. Those of you who are old hands at RSS can skip this post. This is for the people who have been sending me emails saying, "Love the blog...how do I subscribe?"