These tips are applicable to all consumers, not just moms. But this article focuses on moms because they control an estimated 85% of household spending and they exhibit social and advocacy tendencies that can help brands increase sales, relationships and awareness.

Because consumer use of the Internet is endangering traditional CRM models, today's marketers have to integrate new kinds of online strategies into their marketing plans. These strategies are designed to leverage opted-in customer and subscriber databases, not only to generate sales, but also to improve and build on past CRM successes.

No more Lotus spreadsheets and Rolodexes. Modern-day sales and marketing professionals need to work in the cloud and keep their head out of the clouds.

As agencies, one of our responsibilities to our clients is to understand, if not lead, how to maintain our clients' relationships with their customers. But, how are we doing the same to maintain our relationship with our clients? How are we handling our Client Relationship Management?

Offering a compelling and unique service is not enough for a services-based strategy to succeed. Consumers are clear in their belief that the ability of service personnel to effectively perform the service and to represent the selling company is central to securing their loyalty.

Normalization isn't your fault and some great minds are baffled by why it happens, but all agree that it does. Consider it and build your strategy around making changes for the sake of change, before results suffer.

Good sales people should be listening more than speaking. When they are speaking, they should be asking questions. Ensure that your employees, at all levels, are asking for customer insight and feedback.

Does this sound familiar? Your company sales goals are higher, but your budget is lower. Where's that money going? To Marketing to build the brand and generate leads? Or to Sales to close deals? It's an all-too-common dilemma faced by Marketing and Sales executives everywhere.

As brands become more experiential -- providing branded content, creating unique events and environments, maintaining real-time conversations -- so too should a company's CRM efforts. As we move from transactional CRM to social CRM we may as well keep heading towards experiential CRM.

If you work in or with the marketing team, the term SWOT analysis is the bread and butter behind many campaigns, programs and more. Identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats helps guide your overall marketing strategy and determine if a specific program is effective and also what a company can do, moving forward, to improve. As always, we have to add in or think about the customer element. Therefore, if you were to ask your customers to conduct a similar analysis, would their results match what your internal experts conclude?