I saved a recent unsolicited email I received because it perfectly illustrated a flaw that I believe is behind almost all failed marketing attempts.  Let’s call it the “core flaw” — talking about products and services as if that is what their prospective clients want.

Here are the contents of that email (with name and services changed to protect the guilty).

Hi Andy,

Hope you are doing well,

I am following up with you to see if you have availability for a quick call sometime in the following weeks.

Our Services Include:

1. Service #1
2. Service #2
3. Service #3
4. Service #4
5. Service #5
6. Service #6
7. Service #7
8 Service #8
9. Service #9
10. Service #10

[No joke, 10 services were listed.  The email then goes on to talk about *how* the above services are delivered and closes with the following.]
Please do let us know if there is anything we can help with on any of the services we provide.

How about a call next week? Please suggest

Look forward to hear from you,

Thanking you,

First name Last name
Head of Inside sales
Some Company
Address
Ph.: 650 — – —-
firstname@somecompany.com
www.somecompany.com

Just another reminder of what not to do.  So even though using unsolicited emails is somewhat of a last resort, this approach would have been much more effective if the beginning, middle, and end all had to do with me and the results that I am seeking (vs. the “stuff” this sales person wants to sell).

Here is a good exercise for this week:  simply create a list of your products and/or services and write down next to each one a result that your customer will experience if they buy it.  See how it goes!

I talk a lot about having an effective and compelling message as the basis of your marketing. Without it, just about every aspect of your business will be frustrating — poor reaction to campaigns, prospects who “need to think about it,” sales people who complain that leads are poor quality, price pressure, and on and on.

Here is a short video post I did a few months ago on this topic.

I recognize, however, that the way I explain the importance of this issue — the words and examples I use — won’t do the trick for everyone.

So I scoured the Internet for additional insight.  I encourage you to check out the articles below. There really is no more important issue than building your marketing and selling system on top of a message that grabs your prospects and draws them in like a magnet.

K.I.S.S!  Jeff references the same issue that kicks off my “How to Get Your Ideal Prospects to Stop Ignoring You” webinar – that fact that we are inundated with thousands of messages each day – so simple, plain language is best.

Simple Slaps: The Guide to Effective Marketing Messages

Scott Smith, a Bay Area PR expert, has a great 3-part series on his blog that gives you a roadmap for developing a “message down” communication plan to help your business or product become top-of-mind among press and your target audience.

How-To Capitalize On Messaging

A good reminder to focus on the results our clients and customers want.

How to Deliver an Effective Marketing Message

How important it is to use emotion in your message.  Sid’s analysis of why the Southwest Airlines advertisements are effective will help you understand how emotion plays a critical role.

The Anatomy of an Effective Content Marketing Message

Short article that points out 3 potential issues with your marketing message and how to improve upon it.

Effective Marketing Message Importance

I feel this issue is so important that I also put together a webinar on the topic that runs a couple of times per week (see “How to Get Your Ideal Prospects to Stop Ignoring You“ to the right).

I hope you find the articles I reference, and the webinar if you choose to attend, helpful in creating messages that help your business break through the clutter and earn a flood of new opportunities. Questions? Recommendations for additional material? Add comments below so we can all improve. Cheers! Andy

There’s one change you can make that has the potential to instantly improve the effectiveness of all your marketing — improve how relevant, targeted, and compelling a message you use.  If you are a small business owner seeking more high-quality leads, this should be one of the first things you review.
 

In the last post we covered the first element of what it takes to capture more of the sales that you deserve – a mindset of delivering profits. Think like the prize patrol and you’ll feel a lot less self-conscious about the following up with your prospects.

One more mindset comment before I move on to the other three essential elements: behave as though a sale to the prospect yours to lose. Think about it, you and your competitors have equal chance to win the business (and be the one to deliver the benefits) once a prospect has “raised a hand.” Follow up better than the others, and all the business that you deserve will be yours. For those opportunities that aren’t a fit, at least you had the chance to determine one way or the other.

O.k., so how do you follow up better than your competitors? Keep in mind just 3 key points: irresistible, immediate, and persistent.

1. Irresistible: if you take a cold, hard look at what you offer as a “next step” to a prospect who’s indicated interest in what you provide, is it truly irresistible? If it is not something of obvious benefit to them, you have room for improvement.
2. Immediate: a prospect who has stepped out of anonymity to contact you is likely at a peak point in their need. Letting their interest cool off serves no one – except your competitor who might be able to engage the prospect before you have a chance.
3. Persistent: remember, you’re the prize patrol. You are doing your prospects a disservice by not persistently pursuing the chance to see if the value you can deliver is a match for their needs.

I’ll be providing specific tips in upcoming posts to help you capture more of the sales that are yours to lose. For now, I encourage you to think about how well you do the above in your current follow up process. Any obvious areas of improvement?

Let me put one doubt or fear out of your mind. It’s not that you don’t have valuable products or services to offer.

Unfortunately though, the problem certainly isn’t them. You know the phrase “it’s not me, it’s them, right?” Well, it isn’t them, it’s you. More specifically, it is how you are communicating.

As the potential for our prospects and clients to be in a state of “information overload” only increases, it becomes that much more important for us (as marketers) to communicate on “their side of the river.” What do I mean by that?

I mean that we (as marketers) must let go of our need to talk about us, our experience, our products and services… before eventually getting around to the benefits and results we can help our clients achieve (and ideally doing or communicating something that actually gets them closer to those results).

So if the challenge our typical client faces were truly a fire, our attempts to get their attention would include things like:

• an e-mail news tip “3 inexpensive strategies for keeping a fire from spreading”
• a series of videos that visitors to our website receive when they opt in to our e-mail news list “FirePROOF: A 5-Video Series for Fire Battlers Who Want to Squelch Any Fire Without Getting Burned”
• case studies that show our clients’ success in putting out and avoiding all kinds of fires…

Notice I haven’t spoken at all about our years of experience, the products we use, the list of services we offer, etc. Our clients don’t care about those things until later.

For more ideas about how to get the attention of your ideal prospects, and what to do after that, claim your free copy of The Profit Generating Machine: Owner Assembly Instructions, and gain instant access to the video tutorial too, by using the form to the right.  You will learn ways to instantly improve your message and get a better response from your efforts. Cheers!

In the last post I talked about the risks of trying to launch or fiddle with multiple marketing strategies at the same time. I personally believe this is an essential lesson to embrace, so I want to make sure I am communicating this concept well.

If my stalled car analogy left you scratching your head, please call, e-mail or click on chat below. I sincerely want to help you understand the benefits of putting your energy behind one thing at a time – this lesson alone has the potential to transform your business.

I feel so strongly about this that I am devoting a second post to the same idea.  So (assuming that the whole stalled car idea made sense), let’s take a closer look at the downside of jumping from one project to another – The Calendar Effect.

Let’s say you have just 3 different projects (marketing strategies in our case) that you could work on, poke at, fiddle with, whatever your favorite term.  Your tasks may include things like:

• doing research to purchase a list or find alliance partners you could work with
• writing new copy to describe your product or service
• working with someone to help put together a flyer
• preparing a series of communications that will be used in e-mail or social media

And of course, you have to plan time to follow up with your initial leads from this new strategy, make adjustments to the marketing you put in place, measure results…  When you break down what it takes to launch and properly follow up on just one marketing campaign or new strategy, it takes real time and effort.

Moreover, we all know the world doesn’t stop while we put together our marketing. Often a series of tasks that in theory might take a few days of work can truly take weeks to complete.

For simple numbers, let’s say that each of our 3 marketing strategies would take 4 weeks of effort to research, implement, and properly evaluate. If we were to give into temptation and switch from idea to idea each week, rotating from one project to the next, this is what would happen:

We’d be working away for 10 weeks before even one of the strategies was producing good results! 

Have you picked up on the other flaw in this plan?  Think about my prior post (and the reason I say “in theory” on the table above).  Coming back to each project every 3^rd week means we’d be pushing on a stalled car every time – attempting to figure out where we left off, questioning decisions that seemed clear before, trying to coax others (vendors, friends, partners) who were previously helping us to move off of their project-of-the-moment to pay attention to our project-of-the-moment…ugh!

In the real world, the 3 “4-week” projects handled in this momentum-killing, juggler fashion, would take many more weeks to complete.

Now let’s look at how a focus on one project at a time would look on the calendar:

So would you prefer to have momentum work against you while business-getting strategies remained hidden from the light of day for weeks and weeks?  OR would you like to have momentum work for you, with business-getting strategies out in the world working on your behalf as soon as possible?

Do you feel a baseline of doubt – a constant level of anxiety – about your efforts to generate more business?  Do you wonder if you need to change or add to your strategies, but aren’t sure what you should be doing instead?

Perhaps we all experience this fear from time to time.  So what can we do about it?  It can be tempting to just get busy doing “more” by kicking off a completely new campaign or changing a bunch of existing programs – hoping to stumble across something that works.

While we should absolutely use multiple strategies to generate new leads, it is important to recognize that each one is not going to work the way we’d like right out of the gate (sorry to say).  We must be prepared to:

• take focused action to get it off the ground
• adjust our plans as we go
• ultimately automate, delegate or outsource it (so we get the benefit of the leads, without huge personal effort )

Recently I helped a new client uncover that he was not only experimenting with multiple strategies to get new customers, but he was pursuing multiple customer types with differing needs – spreading his efforts way too thin.  In order to explain the pitfalls of this I used an analogy that seemed to help – so I wanted to share it here.

Picture each method for generating leads as a car that is at a standstill.  Getting a car rolling takes a lot of effort in the beginning, right? 

Once you’ve got it moving along things get a little easier, but you can’t totally stop pushing. It requires continued effort to keep making forward progress.

Now imagine that instead of keeping that car rolling along, you leave it alone to go get another car moving.  You’ve got to expend an extra amount of effort once again, because the 2^nd car is at a dead stop.

When it is time to come back to that first car, what’s happened to it?  It’s come to a stop and you need to start all over – with your maximum effort required.  Try to get 4 or 5 cars moving together and you spend nearly all of your time pushing with your maximum effort, to make minimal forward progress.

How does this relate to marketing?  Again, each strategy for getting more business requires focused action to get off the ground, adjustment to produce positive results, and a process for automating, delegating, or outsourcing it once it’s working well.

How does this relate to marketing?  Again, each strategy for getting more business requires focused action to get off the ground, adjustment to produce positive results, and a process for automating, delegating, or outsourcing it once it’s working well.

Instead of frantically moving from strategy to strategy, with haphazard attempts to transform them into productive methods, it is best to:

• get your team focused on launching or improving just one strategy at a time
• stick with it – monitoring and adjusting – until it starts producing the results you want
• determine how you will measure its effectiveness
• automate what you can and make it someone’s responsibility to keep it going

Now it’s time to ask yourself – am I running around spending a lot of  energy giving insufficient shoves to each marketing strategy, or am I investing the time and attention necessary to create momentum?  Today is an opportunity to pick one and commit to doing what it takes for it to deliver great results.

There’s another nifty effect to focusing on one strategy at a time – a bonus benefit that may be just as valuable as the momentum effect.  I’ll cover that in the next post.

There seem to be more options for promoting our businesses available every day, but there certainly aren’t any more hours for us to get everything accomplished J.  I struggle myself to keep it all straight, juggle priorities, and spend time, energy, and money on strategies for generating more business that I know will pay off.

One of the exercises that I have found valuable in my work with clients, and for my own business, is to regularly step out of the day-to-day and:

• Take a close look at how I am actually spending my time and money (not just what my plan says I am doing
• Compare that to an ideal, cohesive, set of systems for marketing and selling
• Look at the gaps between the two

As simple as this sounds, it is something most of us do not do as often as we should.  I guarantee this exercise will inspire new ideas and energize you to find new clients to serve and uncover new methods of generating higher profits.

If you’re saying “This is a great idea, but when and how can I do this?” I’ve taken away those excuses.  I’m so passionate about the importance of this exercise that I’ve condensed it down into an online self-assessment that you can complete in 5 to 10 minutes. 

I’ve included specific recommendations at the end.  If you are wondering how you are going about marketing and selling, and would like your investments of time, energy, and money to be more productive, I encourage you to check it out.

Had a good turnout Tuesday night at the free workshop sponsored by Contra Costa County SCORE, SBDC, and the library.  I always enjoy talking with business owners grappling with real challenges in attracting new prospects and building profitable relationships.  Here are a few pictures of  the event “Marketing: Small Tweaks Yield Big Results.”

I will likely do some more events in the new year, so stay tuned.  Per my previous post, I am always interested in hearing what business owners are struggling with the most.  Add a comment or drop me a note.  Perhaps I can tailor my next topic around your unique challenges.

Getting new clients, patients, or customers can be a frustrating process.  Sometimes it’s not clear what to stop doing, start doing, or do differently. 

So what is frustrating YOU?  I would love to hear what your biggest struggles are as you promote your business and attempt to obtain new clients.

Post comments below.  This will allow me to provide information and share strategies that will be more helpful to you.