It’s Not Marketing You Need For Your Business

Posted on 26. Mar, 2010 by Natalie in Entrepreneurs, Featured, Marketing & Sales

This is a guest post from Beverlee Rasmussen, former E-Myth Advisor. Her amazing understanding of what makes small businesses succeed is highlighted in her interview with me last October.

For the last two months I have been in the market for the all popular iPhone.

Most of us would agree that phone distributors have pretty hefty marketing budgets and aggressive sales teams to ensure their profitability.  Like a good little consumer that I am I head straight to the flagship phone store that has been so cleverly positioned to inquire about obtaining my new toy.

Upon arrival I wait somewhat patiently in line for 12 or so minutes to be greeted by their “customer service” representative that honestly and obviously does not give a hoot about me or my needs.  I walk out of the store after a frustrating 30 minutes no further ahead.

How many times have you gone into a business to buy and walked out frustrated or gone on line to order and the process was so complex you changed your mine?   What does this tell you?

It tells me that you can have the best marketing plan in the world, with the biggest marketing budget in the world and still not make a dime.

Chances are your business does not need to spend any more of your hard earned money on marketing, chances are that if you are not getting consistent repeat business and stellar glowing referrals from happy customers than you need to look at a bigger issue and ask yourself:

• “What is it like to do business with us?”
• “How easy it is for our customers to buy our product or service?”
• “Why did we loose that last customer and how can we change the way we do things so that will never happen again?”

Before you agree to the next newspaper advertisement, trade show booth or social media campaign take a strategic look at your lead conversion  or “customer buying” process from your customer’s point of view.

1. Is your phone number on your web site or do potential clients have to search for it or worse yet fill in a form to have the privilege of buying form you?
2. Do you actually answer your phone and if you can’t do you call potential clients back immediately?
3. Are your prices clear enough that the consumer knows exactly what the deliverable will be for what cost?
4. Do you listen to your clients?
5. What relationship programs do you have in place to keep your clients and reward them for referrals?
6. What have you done to ensure consistency in the quality/quantity of your product/service?
7. Do you make paying clients wait in line, wait on hold, wait for delivery, wait for an answer, wait for a refund, wait until you say so?

When I worked for Michael Gerber, Author of the “E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Businesses Fail and What to Do About It” I conducted over 3000 one on one interviews with business owners all over the world.

The number one thing that they thought they needed help with was marketing, when in fact if you looked just below the surface, you would clearly see the chaos and dysfunction of a broken client buying and client fulfillment system and lack of training  that ensured the company would never grow to it’s full potential.

Very often a business is too overwhelmed by the day-to-day chaos to even be able to handle new or existing customers.  Take a strategic break to get your buying systems in place, trained, and tested and I guarantee that you will attract and keep great customers.

Note from Natalie: When you’re ready to use marketing effectively especially the incredible power of Social Media then contact me!

No related posts.

Tags: Beverlee Rasmussen, Building in Buying Systems, Client Strategy, iPhone distributors, Michael Gerber E-Myth, Small business success, Strategic Business System Design