… In which we learn how marketing can only create opportunities; good marketing creates good opportunities and we learn how to make the most of them.

WHAT MARKETING WON’T DO

We are going to take a look at the thorny subject of marketing, but before we do we have to understand what marketing will and won’t do for us. It does not sell; it does not find customers; it does not make money; it cannot find work. It does one very significant and valuable thing, it creates opportunities. For example, say you are a painter and decorator and you produce a few hundred cheap flyers which you drop in the mail boxes of all the surrounding homes in your neighbourhood. Miraculously, you get a phone call, someone would like their hall and stairs decorated, can you give a price. The first step is not to fool yourself into thinking that this is work coming in.

Great Potential

During my start-up courses, a few weeks in there is always someone declaring that they have got loads of work. What they mean to say is loads of opportunities. That telephone call asking for a price or a quote means that you have been given the opportunity to go and secure that work. Sending out a quote and hoping for the best is way too hit and miss – and is mostly miss. The simplest and most scary solution is to go round to the POTENTIAL customers, sell yourself, sell your price, and then without a flicker or a bead of sweat, ask for the work. Again, I will say if you want to know how to do it, read some basic books on sales; the techniques are easy to master but implementation does need a bit of courage. More to the point, the leaflets were relatively costly (considering that we haven’t earned any money yet), delivering them was a bind, and the response was a bit disappointing (it always is, we have a human tendency to pre-spend our lottery winnings after buying just one ticket).

Face to Face Is the Only Way

So now you have got this opportunity to quote, you get the job! Whoopee – but just hold on up there a moment, there must have been something that convinced our customer (not too cheap, I hope). Think about this, the front door could do with a lick of paint as could the dining room and the kitchen. The customer has a clear need, you want the work and they are convinced by you – so spot the opportunities and go for the rest of the work. The old “Look, while I am here, why don’t I take a look at …” speech – opportunity leading to opportunity.

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Let’s talk about those good old coffee shops again. Look at your own town and the many coffee shops it will surely have. How is their marketing? I have already guessed your reply, “What marketing?” Expensive refit, fancy Italian steam driven coffee machines, dark wood chairs, leather sofas, a contemporary sign … so to just turn the sign to open and wait for the customers, unless your name is Starbucks, is a fatal strategy.

Let’s look at the options: a big splash in the local press costing about £2000 and, amazingly, against every expectation the next morning you get a 10% response, that is 200 people in your coffee shop. Apart from being more people than you can possibly handle, they have cost you £10 each which is a great way to lose money fast.

Give the Stuff Away

OK, let’s try this idea. We will go to bus stations, railway stations and crowded shopping areas, where we will hand out vouchers which cost virtually nothing to produce. The voucher entitles the bearer to a free cup of coffee. We can regulate the flow of people by the quantity of vouchers we hand out. It only costs us £1 and this is only when the voucher is redeemed. Two hundred customers only cost us £200 – a tenth of the cost of the press advertising. That means that at those costs we only go bust a tenth as slowly as the expensive alternative!

Up-Sell

I won’t compromise on my original statement – marketing only brings opportunity – but in this case, what is that opportunity? Stop here and really think about this question. How are you going to recover that £1 or, depending on your choice, that £10? The person comes in, hands over the voucher, gets their free coffee and then what?

You have two ways to seize that opportunity and you will need to do both. First, when the person has got the coffee you ask them to buy something: “A nice slice of homemade carrot cake? Go on, spoil yourself!”

Second, one of the best ways to recover your marketing investment is to secure repeat business. You can only do that if the experience for the customer is truly outstanding. There is no point inviting people to sample what your enterprise offers if what it offers is awful. By this I mean both service and product. You could go into the street, immaculately dressed, with the sunniest of sunny smiles, and offer people dog poo on little slices of Melba toast. They might even smile at you and say “delicious” but I can assure you it is not an experience they would willingly repeat. My absolute obsession is the idea of customer loyalty which is a very fragile treasure indeed – and I would like to introduce a little bit of paranoia in you by suggesting that at your first slip in quality, appearance or service, there will be somebody waiting to take your customer away from you. It is also important to note that it is not what we call good, it is what the customer calls good.

The Legend of the Pickled Onion

I had a friend who decided that he had finished with the cut and thrust of city life, and with his ill-gotten gains he purchased a large fish and chip shop. He challenged me to think of a sales tip that would help the fish and chip business. We told his team that every time they started to wrap the hot food, they should smile and say, “Shall I pop in a pickled onion?” Insignificant? At the end of the first year they had sold £15,000 worth of pickled onions.

Coffee shops and fish and chip shops are just working examples to make a simple point. No matter what you want to do, whenever you find yourself in front of a customer there is an opportunity for you to ask them to buy something.

OPENING DOORS

For the new enterprise there are a few points to consider in that story. Firstly, the job I actually did was a marketing one; the opening of doors and appointment getting is all marketing. Some people talk about telephone selling or tele-sales, but just pause and think, if your enterprise is a complicated, new or expensive one, there is no way you can sell it on the phone. Understand that when I say ‘sell’, I mean done, dusted and money handed over. What you can do with the phone, as with all marketing, is to create opportunities.

Just a Ring

How many times have you been called by a nice, genuine person who says, “We have just taken over a country pub. We think we do the best Sunday lunches in the world and we would love to invite you to come and try us out. To tempt you, we are offering our delicious traditional puddings free with every lunch.” Not very often, I bet! For the new enterprise this tele-marketing (as it should be called) is a gritty, tough business but it does create opportunities.

Remember the coffee bar and those vouchers; the first way to make money is to sell something, the second way to recover the cost, both financial and emotional, is to secure repeat business. I mean, those Sunday lunches better be the best in the world, and maybe it was a good thing our office cleaner didn’t get the job because he may not have been ready to give a brilliant, remarkable and efficient service. The coffee shops I have been to with bad coffee, thick cups and stale cakes – why should I go back?

BEWARE AWARE

There is a big thing in marketing called brand awareness – that means getting people to know about you. Well, if you are crap we do not want to make people aware of that. If you were that office cleaner, how would you handle that situation? First look at your target customer. Are you absolutely get-set ready to exceed the expectations that your marketing generated? If you are, when you get those opportunities, are you making the most of them by securing the business and then asking for more? Do you have a budget for marketing and, if you do, are you aware how you will recover those costs time and time again?

A Bit of a Headache

While marketing creates opportunities it does another vital thing and that is it creates expectations. The danger is they are expectations that are both intentional and unintentional. If I see you munching an aspirin I may be tempted to ask you why.

“Headache, Geoff, terrible headache.”

“I’m sorry, what have aspirins got to do with a headache?”

“I’ve taken them before.”

“Ah … previous experience, satisfied customer, repeat business.”

“No, I think my mum told me about them.”

“Ah, third party recommendation!”

“No, I know I saw an advert in the paper. It said, EAT ASPIRIN, CURE HEADACHE!”

Great marketing, that! A simple message that creates expectations. That phone call we received creates expectations of the world’s greatest Sunday lunch, but the leaflet designed in an anger management class produces the unexpected expectation of an unprofessional klutz.

Give a Dog a Bad Name

So here is the message: all of our marketing must be sharp, professional, well designed and well considered. We do not want our target customers to look at our Day-Glo stars, floppy business cards and computer-generated leaflets and think ‘loser’! When you are marketing, don’t hold back, let rip with the ‘finely crafted’, ‘lovingly produced’, ‘considered the most delicious’, ‘a fabulous investment’, but … and this is a huge but … these are expectation promises. You now have to deliver finely crafted, lovingly produced, delicious, fabulous investments. Customer loyalty – the backbone of successful self-employment – depends on us delivering all our promises.