Hello my name is Larry Neilson and I am the CEO of NMSDATA and Programbusiness.com soon to be known as Neilson Marketing Services. This is my first attempt at blogging so bear with me as I try to figure out how to offer valuable sales and marketing tips and opinions on insurance and financial services news.
We are a small business and we have made a plethora of small business mistakes over the years. I have a lot of experience in and around the insurance industry and I am happy to share with you techniques and tips that have worked for us and for our clients over the years. But, I also want to share with you some of the mistakes we’ve made so that you don’t have to repeat them. Today I want to talk about our upcoming name change.
It’s amazing what you can do with the letters NMS when you are trying to come up with the right name for your company. My brother Jeff and I started this company twenty two years ago, as National Marketing Services, to provide marketing solutions, specifically lead generation, to the property casualty supply chain. We thought our name was too generic and noticed people were constantly shortening our name to NMS so we changed it in 2006 to NMSDATA. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. We didn’t consult any professionals, or ask any of our clients. We just changed our name based on some anecdotal information discussed in a couple of sales meetings. I’m sharing this with you because this was a huge mistake. We noticed early on that people were having a hard time understanding NMSDATA over the phone. They would respond MNS, or excuse me? It was really quite enlightening but something I would rather be hearing about than experiencing. Now we are in the precarious position of having to fix this issue, which means we have to change our name for the second time in six years. This can mean a couple of things, you’re in trouble so you need to change your name, you were sold, or you screwed up the first name change. In our case we screwed up the first name change. So, we contracted with what we believe are some of the best branding and marketing minds in the business and asked a lot of questions. After serious and protracted deliberation, the result of all this activity was our new name, “Neilson Marketing Services”. Now why didn’t I think of that?
There are some exciting things happening here as we try to navigate this stuttering economy and persistent soft market. We are about to launch two new websites re-branding ourselves as Neilson Marketing Services. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in a couple of days to discuss our changing business models for both Neilson Marketing Services and Programbusiness.com.