Do It! Marketing Blog: Marketing for Smart People™

This blog post inspired by ideas from my friend, Tom Davidson, who is THE leadership expert for the forestry industry. Tom says he used to be a victim of "You Never Know" ...but NOW he knows. And his business is booming!

When it comes to small business marketing, "You Never Know" will kill you...

See if these scenarios ring a bell with you...

1. "We've been talking with this prospect for YEARS and now they've suddenly expressed interest... You never know!"
2. "We've been running that expensive ad month after month and sure enough, someone just called... You never know!"
3. "This guy asked me for a proposal last year and then disappeared on me. Couldn't get a hold of him to save my life. But he just opted into our website... You never know!"
4. "We wanted to stop offering that program and focus on more profitable services, but just last month, two clients signed up before we could pull it off the website. You never know..." 
5. "We were in the process of changing our tag line because nobody knew what the heck it meant. But then a new prospect just told me, 'I love your tag line' so we're keeping it. You never know..."
6. "Although 70% of our business is in this industry - we don't want to exclusively focus on them because we'd be cutting ourselves off from other business. You never know..."
7. "We love working with small companies, but my sales coach told me that if we're ever going to seriously grow revenue, we have to start selling to much bigger companies. He may be right. You never know..." 

You're breaking my heart... 

And you're killing your business... 

STOP IT!

Look at you... Spinning your wheels, chasing all your random maybes.

STOP hedging your bets. 

(Thank you to Peter Sheahan for hammering that point home in a speech.)

You need to focus on a SPECIFIC audience, dedicate yourself to ONE distribution channel, lead with one FLAGSHIP service, promote one CORE program, sell one MAIN product line, PRESENT prospects with a PRIMARY investable opportunity. 

The sound bite I share with my marketing seminar audiences and marketing coaching clients is "Focus on what you want - you can always take what comes."

Big problem: Maybe your business model IS "we take what comes."

5 Signs Your Business is a Victim of "You Never Know"

1. You feel you're chasing your tail and spending too much time and too much money bouncing from idea to idea or initiative to initiative...
2. You have no idea where your next lead is coming from...
3. Your pipeline is full of "maybes" but it's been months since you've closed a deal and cashed a check...
4. You find yourself succumbing to too many sales pitches for marketing ebooks, get-rich-quick courses, social media services, online sales tools, subscriptions, advertising, directories, web software...
5. You are relying on hope as a marketing strategy...

Bottom line: The truth is that you may very well never KNOW...

But you sure as hell can DECIDE.

And as my pal Jim Canterucci likes to say, once you DECIDE, your choices are easy. 

That's the key you need to unlock marketing success for your small business so that you get better traction, make faster progress and make more money.

And then leave a comment below with your questions, thoughts, and advice on the ideas above.

Are you a DO IT freak? Welcome to the club!! Please use the social media buttons at the top of this post to share it with your network. YOU are a rock star!

Professional speaker marketing tip

Most professional speakers, consultants, coaches, and solopreneurs have a hard time moving into a niche or declaring a specialty. Most want to attract as much business as possible, so they go for broad marketing across all topics, categories, and industries, trying to attract all audiences for all that they can offer.

If you fall into this trap, your marketing messages get spread so thin that soon, you’re spending more and more time, effort, and money on marketing and getting less and less return. Does this sound familiar?

The truth is that successful experts know who they are – they “move aside” and specialize in a niche. They focus more energy on marketing their “flagship” services to a very specific target market.

Why? Because – unlike Wal-Mart or Citibank, your business can’t be all things to all people. “Move Aside” is about finding your niche, and claiming your expertise in a narrow area of specialty. In plain English, this means you want to become the “Go-To Guy” or “Go-To Gal” for your specific audience – the exact opposite of a “jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”

Perhaps you want to be known as “the consulting firm that knows the insurance industry inside and out” or “the restaurant marketing coach” or “the manufacturing turnaround expert.”

Maybe you want to appeal to corporate executives with an elite image or appeal to family business owners with a homespun image.

The people you speak with will have a very different reaction to these two mental images of your products/services:

• “I think you might be a good fit...”
  
• “Finally! You are exactly who we’ve been looking for!”

Let me give you an example that will make this point very clearly.

In my hometown in suburban Philadelphia, there’s a real company that lists among its services “Carpet Removal, House Cleaning, Odd Jobs, Catering.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I want a caterer, I’m looking for someone who does professional catering all the time. I don’t want to have to worry about “Did they wash their hands after the carpet removal job and before serving the guests at my daughter’s wedding?”

In fact, even among “serious” catering companies (the ones that don’t do carpet removal) if I’m looking for a caterer for a wedding, I’ll probably be drawn to “Wedding Bells Catering” much more so than “Sam’s Catering” or “Good Eats Catering.” In today’s marketplace, specialists rule.

Create your own special niche. Developing a specialty can go a long way to attracting more substantial clients. Being known as the “experts” in a particular field gives you the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. This is the edge that will tend to draw prospective clients to you. The bottom line: more speaking gigs, more consulting offers, more coaching clients, more revenue, more referrals, and taken together, just a whole lot more fun in running your professional practice.

The fact is that the marketplace values clarity, focus, and direction.

Once you become known for being great at one thing, your company can spread its wings and start to attract more business across the board through a powerful “Halo effect.” If you get known over time for being great at one thing, in the future, people will begin to naturally assume you’re great in a variety of other ways, too. However, if you try to say you’re great at everything on Day 1, nobody will believe you!

The only way to know if this will work for your business is to try it! You’ll be pleased with the speed and magnitude of the results.

What do you think? What's YOUR success story with moving aside? Agree? Disagree? Please use the COMMENTS area below to jump into the conversation...