Bill Jelen and Ivana Taylor are Host Anita Campbell’s guests on this very interesting show. Bill is Mr.Excel and Ivana Taylor is from Third Force Marketing.

Together they have written a new book called Excel for Marketing Managers. The book is available at Third Force Marketing or at MrExcel.com.

You might be asking by now, “what does Excel have to do with marketing? Isn’t marketing all about communication and messages?” Well, wrong you are!

If you care about marketing you should care about data — data about your customers, who they are, what they buy, how often they buy, the surveys they complete. If you are doing your job correctly you should be swimming in data.

Once you have all that data what do you do with it? Analyze it of course, and you can use Excel to do so. In this 60 minute conversation Bill and Ivana share multiple Excel shortcuts on how to become a spreadsheet master. But in addition they also share many tips of what type of marketing data should be captured, tracked and analyzed.

As Ivana says, ‘Marketing is all about being chosen.’ Listen now and learn how mastering Excel could be the critical marketing skill you need to achieve business success.

Recorded: May 30, 2006

Duration: 60 minutes

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About Bill Jelen

Bill Jelen, the world’s foremost spreadsheet wizard, now known internationally as “Mr. Excel.” His web site is the premier source for Excel tips and solutions (MrExcel.com) and had over 10 million page views last year.

Jelen “broke the code” in Excel, helping accountants and business professionals to do in a single click what used to take many hours. He’s saved companies millions of dollars with his programming solutions and self-help resources (book, website, CDs, message boards) and has made the world’s most commonly used office software perform. He’s currently developing Excel solutions products geared to particular industries. For example, the “F&I Menu Wizard” is a proprietary program for car dealerships that simplifies and speeds the finance and insurance process and increases dealerships’ profit per vehicle by an average of $225. It is being used in hundreds of dealerships.

Jelen fills in the gaps the software company left behind. He is fast, responsive service and easy solutions. People aren’t finding that in the automated responses of email customer support and vague answers from paid telephone support. Jelen’s self-help tips, long-life archived Q&A’s and message boards are an online community where Excel users help each other sharpen their Excel skills and resolve functions like preventing duplicate data entry, calculating hours worked when the shift spans midnight, deleting unwanted links and hundreds of other Excel functions.

About Ivana Taylor

Ivana Taylor has built a business around making pricing and competitive pressures go away. She has spent nearly 20 years re-positioning public, private and equity-funded industrial organizations into new, more profitable markets. She loves the challenge and reward of turning a mature organization in a mature market into a bustling, impassioned competitive force. And so do her clients. Her approach to marketing is grounded in sound strategic principles – but look out for her unorthodox approach to application and implementation.

In 1999, Ivana formed Third Force, a strategic marketing firm that provides its business-to-business clients with a unique and profitable market position that makes them the obvious choice for their ideal customers.

Ivana calls herself an instinctive and intuitive strategist. She sees those subtle decision-points that typically make the difference in who your ideal client will choose; you, your competitor or nothing at all.

Ivana’s vision is to make her clients the only game in town.

Ivana holds a Masters Degree in Management from Antioch University, a Certificate in German Language Studies from the University of Munich and a B.S. in Marketing from Pennsylvania State University.

Ivana is an active member of the Akron and Cleveland business communities. She is a member of TEC, Women’s Network and National Association for Women Executives. She is also a motivational speaker on team development, leadership and strategic planning.