When I think of the places I renew my subscriptions or memberships for—theaters, magazines, AAA (a SIPA member!), Baseball Digest, the DC Film Society—it's mostly either for the emotional connections, the advantages I get, or a good outcome from the past year.

Focus on customers and not ourselves, Arno Langbehn, CEO, B. Behr's Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, told us in a Pre-Conference Workshop titled Extraordinary Examples for Marketing, Product Development and Sales and How to Implement Them Successfully Into Your Publishing House at SIPA 2019 last month. That video is now posted here—it also includes Kiplinger President Denise Elliott and marketing director Chris Moffa talking about emails and renewals.

When a potential advertiser or sponsor approaches Ryan Vincent, director of media sales, EHS, Simplify Compliance, and says, "I would give you this much money if you can do that," like a good improv performer—which I'm sure he is—Vincent answers, "'We can do that.' I'm a big yes man," he said.

In a well-attended Pre-Con Workshop on Day One of SIPA Annual 2019, Arno Langbehn, CEO, B. Behr's Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, covered Steve Jobs—"It's not the customer's job to know what he wants"—superheroes (well, kind of, "The hero is the customer," Langbehn said)—Groundhog Day (the film and the idea of using the information that you know to sell)—and ponchos ($5 when dry, $20 when it's raining—strike when something's hot). 

"For our annual quality management conference, we successfully tested a new form of advertising: We sent a personal video to the participants of the last two years who had not yet registered," Arno Langbehn, CEO of Behr's GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, told me recently. "The result was 30 videos sent, three registrations and $6,000 in revenue from these former participants. The time expenditure in total was two hours."

Like many industries that date back awhile, business valuation has a lot of older white men. Towards the end of an honest, funny, hopeful and proud women's leadership panel at SIPA Annual 2018 in June, Lucretia Lyons, president of Business Valuation Resources, related a story.

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