Small Business Marketing from Charlie Cook

My kids taught me a lot about marketing communication when they were teenagers. My son had me playing 20 questions. When I asked what he’d done at school or out with his friends the night before, I’d get one of two classic teenage responses; “Stuff” or “Nothing”. I’d have to pepper him with questions to learn any more.

With my daughter, I could hardly get a word in edgewise. She’s a great storyteller, but she wanted to tell me everything about everyone. Neither of them were really giving me what I wanted.

If these had been sales calls and I’d been a business prospect instead of a devoted parent, I’d have ended the conversation or walked away. I’d have thought, “Great people, but they don’t understand my point of view or my problems.”

Does your small business marketing turn prospects off with too little or too much information?

Do you approach your marketing from your customers’ point of view?

Is your small business marketing generating the leads you need to grow your business?

If a prospect asked you what you do, you’d never respond by just saying “Stuff”.

But what do you say? Do you tell them that you’re in advertising, or that you are a lawyer, accountant, designer, entrepreneur, franchise consultant, realtor, trainer, or software developer?

Statements like this don’t start a conversation fully explain what you do or how a prospect could benefit from your products or services. These one or two word answers are the equivalent of your teenager telling you they’ve been doing “Stuff”.

Don’t make your prospects play “20 Questions” with you to understand your business. Give them a clear, succinct marketing message that describes how you can help them and why they need you.

Once you’ve got their attention with your marketing message, follow it up with the information they need, a clarification of the problems you solve, the solutions you provide and a reason to contact you. Make it easy for your prospects to get what they want from your marketing materials, whether you use ads, brochures, a web site or other media.

• Define your prospects’ most common concerns and the problems they want resolved.

• Present the solutions your provide in the context of these problems.

• Explain why they need you, from their point of view.

• Anticipate and answer their questions

I was on the phone with Marilyn, who wanted to know what her firm could do to spread the word and get more clients. Last year they made over a million dollars, but so far this year they haven’t gotten the number of inquires they need to continue to grow the company. What’s getting in the way?

While I was talking with Marilyn, I typed her firm’s URL into my web browser to take a look at the way they are promoting themselves. I had two reactions when her site came up in my browser. One, it was very attractive and professionally done. Two, after looking at it for a few
minutes, I had no idea what the business actually did, who they helped or how.

There was a lot of information on the site, but it wasn’t telling me what I needed to know. It took me another ten minutes and a number of questions to find out what her small business software development and computer-networking firm did.

Your prospects don’t have the motivation of a parent talking to a teenager. If its hard for your prospects to figure out whether or not you can help them from your small business marketing materials, they’re gone. Don’t expect them to decipher unclear copy or hunt through your web site to find the information they need.

Generate more leads and sales by using a marketing message, supporting marketing copy and a coordinated marketing system that helps your prospects understand why they need you and how you can solve their problems.

Want more leads, more prospect relationships and more sales? If you want different results you’ll need to do something different with your marketing. Get the marketing tools and expertise you need to make a change and to grow your business faster >>

Marketing for sales is like rowing a boat. When you know how the pointed bow moves smoothly forward through the water encountering the least amount of resistance. Rowing backwards, the square stern of the boat pushes against the water, requiring more effort and increases the risk of having a wave come over the transom (back) and swamping it. Yet most people market backwards, trying to grow their business while pushing against the greatest level of resistance.

Wouldn’t you like to market your business so that it moved easily forward?

What’s the first thing most people do to increase sales of their products, services? They put together a description of their credentials. Then they pick up the phone, run an ad campaign, send out a brochure and or build a web site and ask people to buy.

Do you know anyone who has used this approach?

Have you tried it yourself?

Were you happy with the number of new clients and customers you attracted?

Discover how to market forwards, attract more prospects, reduce resistance to sales, and have more clients and customers >>

It’s a common misconception that the fastest way to attract more clients and customers is to focus on asking people to buy. It looks like the obvious route, but in most cases it generates only a trickle of new clients for small business owners. It can work if you’re a large company with millions of dollars to spend building your brand. Why doesn’t this selling approach work for service professionals and small business owners?

A sale is the end point or one of the waypoints in your relationship with a client. Before they are ready to give you their money prospects need to be confident that you have what they want, and they trust your product or service will deliver on your promises.

When you lead with a focus on selling and your credentials you run into high levels of resistance. It is like trying to row a boat backwards. Marketing is about building relationships, one by one. Start by focusing on what your prospect wants, not on yourself.

Think about it. When you pick up the phone or encounter a friend, what’s one of the first things you say? Do you launch into a monologue about yourself? Most people usually start the conversation with a friendly questions or two and then find a topic of mutual interest. If you have information your friend is interested in, you share it. I frequently get calls from people who say they hate marketing their business. Why? Trying to convince people to buy feels pushy.

An alternative that is more effective – and more fun – is to focus instead on giving people what they want. Get your prospect’s attention by leading with a question or statement that succinctly gets them thinking about how you can solve a problem they have. This is your marketing message or elevator speech, not your sales pitch. Once you have their interest, give them something they want in order to prompt them to contact you. This could be a short report or article.

Does your business marketing plan give people what they want?

Does your elevator speech help start a conversation and a relationship?

Increase Your Business Opportunities and Sales in 15 Seconds. You’ll get more business with a BRILLIANT Marketing Message and Elevator Speech. Learn how to get your prospects’ attention by giving them what they want and you’ll attract more clients and be more successful.

Once a prospect gives you their contact information, go to work and make good on their trust by showing an interest in their needs and giving them a steady stream of useful tips. The more you give your prospects, the stronger your relationship will be.

Rowing a boat backwards is hard work and won’t get you very far. There is just too much resistance. To attract more clients and grow your business stop marketing backwards and pushing against high levels of resistance. Give your prospects what they want, build relationships and you’ll find more prospects buying the solutions you provide.

• Are You Marketing Backwards?

• Building Marketing Momentum

• Creating Marketing Fireworks

• Get Business Now: Play by the Marketing Rules

• How to Improve Your Marketing Performance

• Overcoming Objections to Price

• Transforming Objections into Selling Points

• Tune Up Your Business Sales & Marketing and Stop Wasting Time

• What is the Most Effective Way to Advertise?

• Where to Focus Your Small Business Marketing?

• 5 Sales/ Marketing Strategies to Build Your Business

…More Small Business Marketing Tips and Marketing Ideas

Use these sales & marketing articles to grow your business.

Imagine that you ran an ad, mailed a brochure, or sent an email ad to a new list of people who fit your target market profile and everyone who saw it responded right away and made a purchase.

Has this ever happened to you?

Of course not. The first time people hear about your products or services is the least likely time for them to buy.

When you go out for a night on the town, do you go to a new restaurant you’ve never heard of or do you typically go to one that you know and like? Similarly, who is the most likely to buy your products and services, someone who doesn’t know you or someone who has experienced the high quality and the results you provide? Clients who have bought from you before, are the most likely to buy from you. Think about it.

If long-term prospects and clients are your best source of revenue, where should you focus your strategic marketing? I occasionally make a sale the first time someone visits my web site, but more often it’s the people who I have been in contact with for months that become my best customers and clients. Why is this?

The longer you’ve had a relationship with a prospect or client, the more they know and trust you. Once they buy or use your products, they’ve experienced the quality you provide and are even more likely to buy again. They are also more likely to recommend you to others.

Discover how to focus your marketing plan and build long-term relationships with clients >>

Marketing research has shown that people are more likely to buy after six or seven contacts. Some web businesses use this as the basis of their marketing and provide a tutorial series you can sign up for with one sent out each week for six weeks. While this is an improvement on the one time spot ad, it misses the boat.

The problem with this approach is that you don’t know when your prospects will want to make a purchase. What happens if they need help on week eight but have lost your contact information?

What you want to do is build long-term relationships so that whenever a new prospect or past client has a need, they think of you as the expert to go to or to refer someone else to. The longer you are in contact with prospects and clients the more opportunities you have to demonstrate how helpful you or your products are and to earn their trust.

Depending on what you’re marketing, you may need to establish a little or a lot of trust. If you sell major label music CDs for $17, it may not take much work to convince people you can ship them what they want. If you provide financial services and want prospects to trust you with their life’s earnings, it can take longer. It may be six to seven months before your prospects will consider even having a conversation.

Discover how to use your web site marketing to build relationships with prospects and convert them to clients >>

Use the following three steps to build long-term profitable relationships:

1. Focus on your prospects’ needs and wants and offer something for free to motivate people to contact you.

2. Contact your prospects regularly and give them tips and ideas they can use.

3. Couch your offers in terms of what your prospects are looking for.

Which is more important, new prospects or existing clients?

The answer of course is both. To grow your business you need to constantly grow your network of contacts, of people who know how you can help them. At the same time, focus your efforts on building long-term relationships so that prospects become clients and clients become repeat clients. Do this and you’ll have more people interested in what you offer and more people buying your products and services.

Not Getting As Many Clients As You Want?

There is a good chance it is not the services or products you offer that is the problem. While you may be an expert in most aspects of your business, many service professionals and small business owners don’t do the right things to market their products and services. They don’t have a small business marketing strategy that works.

You are probably spending time and money on advertising, mailings, sales calls and presentations to prospects. But going through the motions of marketing doesn’t guarantee results.

More often than not, potential clients aren’t fully aware of the range of your products and services and don’t think of your company even when they have a genuine need,despite all your efforts. You could pour more time and money into individual marketing tactics and achieve only an incremental amount of growth. Or you could use these proven marketing strategies to attract clients and grow your business.

Is your business strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your marketing plan help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Discover how to increase sales with a better small business marketing strategy and marketing plan .

1. Start with Client Problems
2. Target Your Market
3. Demonstrate Value
4. Build Your Network
5. Stay in Touch

1. Start with Client Problems
Most service professionals focus their small business marketing on their expertise, their approach and the products and services they offer. While competence is a key to doing the work, most clients’ primary concern is getting problems solved and having their spoken and unspoken needs met. Instead of marketing your credentials, your processes and methodology, market your knowledge and the solutions you offer.

Use every resource available to you, from web research to your network to identify the common problems your clients experience. Use every opportunity, phone call, every contact to deepen this understanding. Instead of focusing on your services and methodology, use questions to understand clients’ specific needs. Lead with an identification of clients’ problems and follow with a focus on the solutions you provide.

Marketing is about making connections, specifically between a client’s unmet need and the solutions you provide. The best way to impress clients is to show them you understand the problems they are experiencing. If you want to leverage your credentials, mention past clients when you provide examples of how you solved similar problems.

2. Target Your Market
Are you getting a positive response to your offline and internet marketing plan? If not, then you may not have targeted your market and their specific needs and interests precisely enough. Many business owners and marketers often try to do the impossible and be everything to everybody. Instead define your niche market and get the attention of this group.

3. Demonstrate Value
Actions speak louder than words. If you want clients to be aware of the value of your products or services, you will need to give them a test drive. Open the door with newsletters, workshops, a free session or articles found on your web site. Over time demonstrating the value you provide will convince prospective clients of your ability to solve their problems and help position you as a trusted advisor.

4. Build Your Network
The objective is to know who is interested in your products and services. Networking is a good idea because people like to buy products from people they know and trust. If they’ve met you or been referred to you they are more likely to trust you.

Depending on the business you are in, you can build your network of prospects through conventional networking or through your web site and email. Either way the more qualified prospects you have in your network the better.

5. Stay in Touch
Memories are short. Once we hit middle age most of us can’t remember what we had for dinner two days ago, much less the host of services various firms provide. In most cases its safe to assume your target market has forgotten about the range of solutions you offer, if they remember you at all.

Stay in touch with your target market on a monthly or, at a minimum quarterly basis. When you contact people be clear about the action you want prospective, existing and past clients to take.

Can you imagine having a phone conversation where you couldn’t hear what the person at the other end was saying? You would have difficulty getting much done and you certainly couldn’t tailor your response to their needs and interests. Yet this is the way many people market their products and services.

Most people make the mistake of thinking that marketing is one-way communication. The tendency is to create business marketing materials and push them out to your target market and hope for a response. Marketing monologues, whether in person, in a brochure or on a web site are a sure way to scare prospects and clients away. Any hope for lead generation is lost.

If you want to grow your business your objective should be to create a dialogue with prospects and help them become clients. Starting your marketing efforts by creating a two-way conversation with prospects can help you target your business marketing efforts and open the door to future business.

Learn how to find the right words to explain exactly how you help prospects. With a brilliant elevator speech and marketing message you’ll attract more clients right away. Use the ’15 Second Marketing’ guide to create more business opportunities.

•Is your marketing communication two-way?
•How often do you ask your prospects to identify their biggest problem, relative to the service or product you offer?
•How often do you survey your target market to find out what they are worried about?
•Can you list their most pressing concerns?
•Do you use this information to regularly improve your marketing strategy and materials?

Large corporations provide annual job performance reviews and conduct annual customer satisfaction surveys. While annual feedback like this may be useful to you and is better than nothing, your goal is to create an ongoing dialogue with your prospects and clients so that you can regularly improve how you market your services.

You won’t want to rush back to the office after every client meeting to revise your marketing strategy, but the more often you ask questions to understand client and prospect concerns and then shape your marketing to match, the more new clients you’ll attract.

Learn how to position yourself and your business for success, learn where to start and how to focus your marketing to attract more clients and increase sales >>

Use your articles to establish yourself as an expert and increase credibility. Learn how to write your articles and where to distribute them with ‘Opening Doors with Your Articles’

Improve your marketing by listening to prospects and clients.
Get them talking by asking the right questions and then hear what they have to say. Fortune 500 companies use marketing firms, charging tens of thousands of dollars to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. If you’re an independent professional or small business owner, you can do it on your own provided you are a good listener.

Good general questions to ask include:
•What’s the biggest obstacle to growing your company?
•What problems are your biggest concerns?
•What are your three most important objectives for the next month?
•What’s the decision making process in your organization?

The specific questions you use will depend on the problems you solve for clients. If you install phone systems, you’ll want to know what your prospects’ biggest concern is about their phone system and its installation. If you’re an accountant your questions will be about financial objectives. If you provide conflict management you’ll want to find out the most common sources of discord.

Start using your web site to generate more leads and sales.

The objective is to understand your prospects needs and then you can use this information to position your products and services. Let your target market tell you what they want to see and read. Good times to fine tune your marketing include; before you develop your business marketing materials, when you talk with prospects and in your conversations with clients.

•List 3-5 questions you could ask a prospect or client to identify their biggest concerns relative to your service or products.

If you want to attract more clients, find ways to ensure your communication is two-way. Frequent surveys, in-person conversations and even watching how your clients use your products are all good ways to get feedback. When your communication is two-way you’ll know what prospects and clients are concerned about and you can target your marketing to increase your lead generation and thus, business.

Many small business owners struggle to grow their businesses only to find themselves stuck in a morass of marketing, management and delivery tasks. As your business becomes more complex and time consuming, the original vision of the business usually changes or gets lost, and it can become increasingly difficult to define and implement a small business marketing strategy that helps you achieve your small business potential.

As a small business marketing coach I have many small business clients whose marketing is going nowhere because they haven’t clearly identified where they want to take their business/what they want their business to be/ and what role they want to play in it.

Whether you want to take your business to the next level or are just starting out, to be more successful at marketing you need to regularly clarify what you want your business to be and what your role in it is or should be. In order to develop a small business marketing strategy and plan that works for you, you need to first clarify:

•What are your business passions and strengths?
•How do you want to spend your time?
•What work tasks you enjoy?
•What type of business you want to create?

Is your marketing strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your marketing plan help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Discover how to define the blueprint for a profitable web site, learn the strategies, tactics and small business ideas that can help you grow you online and offline profits >>

Define Your Business Passions and Strengths
The energy, determination and persistence it takes to build a small business only makes sense if you are doing something you love – or that at least gives you great satisfaction. What do you enjoy doing the most? What are you happy doing day in and day out?

What are your Strengths?
Identify your business passion, and then examine your strengths within that passion. How can you leverage your interest and knowledge to become a sought after expert in your field?

Say you love skiing and want to make a living in that industry, which you know well. Are you going to run a ski shop, be a ski instructor, or become a skiing guru, sought after by thousands, with your simple and innovate teaching techniques?

•Which aspects of your passion suit your expertise and experience?
•How can you build a business around them?

Set Goals For How You Want to Spend Your Time
Personality and interests vary. Some small business owners have a passion for hands on delivery, others enjoy focusing on growing their business and coordinating the delivery of products and services.

Some can’t stand being stuck in an office all day; others would prefer never to talk to a client or customer. What aspects of your business are you good at and which do you want to develop further? Use the following questions to help you clarify how you want to spend your week.

•Do you like being in charge of marketing, operations or service delivery?
•Are you an educator, do you love sharing ideas about what you know or do you like inventing new products people can use without your involvement? Or both?
•Do you prefer managing the business and delegating daily tasks to others?
•Do you like to travel or prefer to work from an office or at home?
•How important is flexibility in scheduling and work location?
•Do you want to work less and earn the same?
•Do you want to work part time or do you love your work so much that you could do it seven days a week?
•Do you want to structure your work so it is more satisfying?

Clarify the Tasks You Enjoy
We all like and dislike specific activities, excel at some and are better off delegating certain tasks to others. Clarifying what you like and dislike is essential to then defining the strategies and structures you need to create a more satisfying work environment.

•Do you enjoy coming up with new products?
•Do you enjoy selling your services and products?
•Do you like to write or prefer public speaking?
•Or both?
•Is the phone your communication tool of preference?
•Do you prefer to use email for most of your communication?
•Do you enjoy public speaking and sharing your ideas?
•Do you enjoy following up with employees to make sure
they’ve done agreed on tasks?

Is your marketing plan helping you earn as much as you’d like? Does your marketing plan help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Specify the Type of Business You Want to Create
What have the answers to the questions above told you about your business and your role in it? Depending on the services and products you provide, does your business need additional staff, facilities, technology, geographic presence, or capital?

Would you prefer to be a successful one person business/sole proprietor? Would you like to grow your business to include five to fifty employees? Will profit or passion be the driving force? Or both? Are your markets local, regional, national or international?

Answer these questions to define your small business goals and your role in your business’ growth. Once you have a clear and current idea of where you are going, you can define a marketing strategy to get there, to achieve your business potential.

At times, no matter what you do your marketing is stuck and you’re not attracting new clients quickly enough. It doesn’t seem to make a difference how much time or money you put into it, its like you are driving in slow motion. You just seem to be spinning your wheels and not getting any traction to move your business forward as quickly as you’d like.

What is it that’s keeping you from growing your business and your revenue?

Is the economy limiting your business? Possibly but unlike many large corporations that get hammered by economic trends, independent professionals and small business owners don’t need mass movements of clients to be successful. Most small businesses need a few hundred or few thousand clients to do very well. You just have to do a better job of marketing than your competitors to bring them in.

Is the lack of money to spend on business marketing limiting your business? The most successful independent professionals spend very little on marketing relative to profits. They utilize email, referrals, and other small business marketing tactics to get attention, build trust and attract clients.

Is the lack of time the problem with your marketing? If you
run your own business, there is never enough time in the day to accomplish everything you need to do. But the people who make the time for marketing see their businesses grow.

Let’s face it; your biggest marketing obstacle is you: your perceptions/ attitudes, behavior and organization.

Learn how to find the right words to explain exactly how you help prospects. With a brilliant marketing message you’ll attract more clients right away. Use the ’15 Second Marketing’ guide to create more business opportunities.

Common problems that may be holding your marketing back:

•Not enjoying marketing yourself and your business.
•Not having a small business marketing strategy or plan
•Not integrating marketing into your daily schedule.
•Taking over two minutes to describe how you solve clients problems.
•Spending too much on promotional campaigns without testing your copy or inexpensive tactics first.
•Talking too much and not listening to prospects.
•Not giving away helpful ideas to prospects in order to build trust and establish yourself as the expert who can solve their problems.
•Not regularly contacting prospects.
•Forgetting to provide prospects with offers they can’t refuse.

Are you stuck by your own thinking, your behaviors or your perceptions about your marketing and what is or isn’t possible?

Learn how to position yourself and your business for success, where to start and how to focus your marketing to attract more clients and increase sales >>

Give your small business marketing a chance
The good news is that if you are your biggest marketing obstacle you can easily become your biggest marketing asset. Take the following steps to change your marketing behaviors and perceptions and give your marketing a chance.

Goals – Write down goals for your business and for your marketing. Studies show that people who commit to written goals are more successful, often making ten times as much money as those who don’t.

Knowledge – Leverage all you know about your business to provide prospects and clients with a steady stream of ideas they can use. In this way you demonstrate your expertise and stand out from the competition.

Money – Spend as little as possible on marketing, but do expect to spend money relative to the returns you anticipate. For example if you are an independent consultant and want to grow your business to two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars in revenue per year you will need to spend some money on your marketing effort.

Time – Schedule a meeting with yourself every week to review your marketing strategy, look at what is and isn’t working and write your next ad or article. Your most important job is to market your business and then to deliver the services and products. Make sure the way you spend your time reflects this.

Get out of your own way to improve your marketing and attract more clients. Change your marketing actions and perceptions. If you don’t have it, get the marketing knowledge you need and make good use of the time and money you do have. When you remove the obstacles to your marketing you’ll find your business gaining traction and clients.

Have you ever sent out a sales letter and received little or no response, or put up a web site and found hardly anyone visiting it. Have you worked hard on an article only to find that few people read it and even fewer contacted you as a result?

Let’s be honest; everyone makes mistakes. The difference between the winners and the losers in business is that winners recognize their mistakes and avoid making the same blunder again. Each time you can recognize a marketing mistake and correct it your marketing will be that much better.

Small business marketing experts got that way by working full time at making more marketing mistakes than you can imagine and then learning from them.

Is your small business marketing strategy helping you earn as much as you’d like? Do your marketing plans help you generate hundreds of prospects a week and help you convert them to paying clients? Are you getting the results you want from your marketing?

Define the blueprint for a profitable web site and the small business marketing strategies and tactics that can help you grow you online and offline business >>

Common small business marketing missteps include:

• Starting your marketing with a focus on your credentials, products and services instead of on client problems.

• Using a label to describe what you do instead of a “meme” or value positioning statement that tells prospects which problems you solve in a sentence or less.

• Developing a tagline, article title or web page title without taking the time to discover which words will attract your clients.

• Wasting time on pushing information about yourself out to prospects instead of pulling them in with ideas they are interested in.

• Not providing prospects with a free offer to get their contact information.

• Forgetting to regularly follow up with prospects.

• Building a web site without a clear step-by-step map of how you will attract visitors to the site, and what you want them do once they visit your site.

• Not having offers and strategies to turn prospects into clients and clients into repeat clients and sources of referrals.

If you’ve made any of the above marketing mistakes, you’re not alone. But if you want to grow your business, don’t repeat these blunders again and again. If you’re not getting the results you want, look for a new strategy, modify your tactics and change your marketing plans.

Strategy – Base your small business marketing on a clear set of principles. Have a clearly defined strategy and marketing plan. Use approaches that work for independent professionals and small business.

Tactics – Plan your small business marketing so its organized and individual efforts are additive and contribute to building your business.

Materials – Make sure individual marketing pieces resonate with your target market, get their attention and move them to the action you want them to take.

Fix your marketing plans and materials by testing ideas, keeping the ones that work and throwing out the ones that don’t. If you self published a book, but its not flying off the shelves, identify the variables that could be affecting sales.

It may be the book’s title, the sales letter, or the price and bonus offers. Pick one of these and make some changes. Test a different title, rewrite your sales letter, or the price and bonus offers and see what happens.

Depending on your time line and goals, you may want to avoid making all the marketing mistakes on your own, and get expert advice from someone who has made or seen most of the mistakes before.

In the process of growing your business you’re bound to make marketing missteps. The more you make, identify and learn from the faster your marketing will improve and the more clients you will attract.

Are your marketing plans helping you generate hundreds of prospects a week and increase your sales?

Chris wrote from Arizona to ask, “How do I market a business when the owner doesn’t want to spend any money on marketing or advertising?” I get similar questions daily from people who are their own bosses, asking, “How can I get more attention for my business and more clients with my small business strategic marketing plans? I don’t have any money for marketing.”

Trying to grow a business without allocating funds for your sales & marketing or advertising is like owning a car and not budgeting funds to buy gas. People could stop by and sit in your car with you, but you wouldn’t be able to drive it anywhere. You’d feel silly and frustrated. What can you do other than look for a new job with a more enlightened boss?

How can you get your boss to part with his or her hard-earned dollars to help you and the business be even more successful?

Discover how to grow your business using a proven sales, small business marketing strategy and effective business small business marketing plan >>

1. Define Revenue Objectives
The first step is to clarify revenue goals. Don’t ask your boss for money for marketing right off the bat; you’ll face a lot of resistance. Instead, ask your boss (or yourself, if you’re the owner):

• How much did the business make last year?

• What percentage of our target market is using our services?

• How many more clients and customers would you like to attract this year?

• How much would you like to see the business grow this year?

• What areas of the business do you think have the greatest potential for growth?

Help the boss to define the dollar amount you’d like to see added to last year’s revenue. Once the revenue goal has been defined, you’ll have much greater success in finding the resources to reach it.

2. Affirm the Impact of Sticking with the Status Quo
The next step is to clarify what would happen if you maintained your existing levels of marketing. Ask questions like:

If we continue to do the same kind and amount of marketing (which may be zero):
• Will sales increase or decline?

• What will the impact on revenue be?

3. Overcome Resistance to Spending
In your conversation with your boss, be prepared to respond to predictable objections. Most successful business owners got that way by being cautious about spending. Fewer expenses mean greater profitability. When your boss says, “advertising doesn’t work” or “I’ve tried marketing in the past and it didn’t make a difference,” be ready to follow up.

The best way to handle these objections isn’t to counter them, but to agree with your boss and ask the next question to help him or her understand why they didn’t work. For example, you might say:

You’re right; prospects didn’t respond to our ads.
• Do you think we were reaching the right audience?

• Were we advertising in the right places at the right times?

• If our marketing message or elevator speech didn’t prompt a response, what about testing some alternative marketing messages?

• Use questions to help your boss understand what worked and what didn’t and why.

Discover how to get attention for your business with your sales / marketing message and your advertising >>

4. Define the Investment Needed to Achieve Objectives
When business marketing is done well, it generates a return far greater than the expense. Start-up companies can expect to spend anywhere from 25% to 50% of net revenue on marketing; established companies from 5 to 15%.

The result is an ROI of two-to-one to twenty-to-one. What you want to do is help your boss determine the amount to spend on marketing in relationship to your company’s growth objectives. Ask him or her questions like:

• How much money have you invested in growing the business?

• What percent of revenue do similar businesses annually spend on marketing?

• If we could increase business by 50% this year, how much more would the company make?

• If we could double or triple each dollar we invest in marketing, would you be interested?

How much would you be willing to invest in marketing to increase revenue by another hundred thousand dollars this year?

5. Have a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business
Your boss will want to have confidence in a solid marketing plan before allocating funds. It is easy to throw money at marketing and advertising, but you need a proven business marketing strategy to generate a positive return. Questions to ask yourself include:

If I could get the boss to allocate more funds for marketing:

• What are the most effective ways to get attention for our business?

•Could we improve our marketing messages the elevator speech we use to describe our business?

• How can I generate more leads?

• How can I increase our conversion rate of prospects to clients?

• How can I increase the dollar amount of sales per client?

People are reluctant to spend money on marketing if they’ve had bad experiences in the past or don’t clearly see its benefits. Help your boss understand what went wrong with previous marketing plans and present the financial case for making the investment in marketing. You’ll have less trouble getting the funds allocated for marketing, and you’ll be on your way to growing your business.