Mistake #3 – Altered sequences
There is ONE thing that you have to have before doing ANY form of marketing which if you don’t, it will fail.
We’ll come to that in a minute. First let’s talk about cookies.
There are 129,000,000 results on Google for “chocolate chip cookie recipe”, and Lord knows how many actual recipe variations!
There are many things in life with which if you change the order, there is no negative effect. Chocolate chip cookies are a great example. Butter, brown sugar, flour, chips and flour. It doesn’t really matter in what order you combine them, you end up with more or less the same choco cookie, with slight differences in density, crunch, etc.
And then there are many things in life that will not work at all if you change the sequence. For instance, first you make a foundation, then you build the frame on that foundation, and then you can put in electrical, and plumbing. You don’t do the plumbing and electrical until you have a foundation and a frame. It’s impossible.
If you want to achieve a desirable outcome, some valuable result, you have to take the right steps to get there.
People love doing their own thing. They will intentionally not follow processes and procedures, even if they know they work.
Marketing is a weird one.
It’s a bit of both.
There are things with which you can change the order and have no effect, and there are things that would be utterly disastrous if you changed the sequence.
A story can help illustrate this.
I was consulting a client, he had a marketing company and was selling SEO (search engine optimization, for those of you who don’t know). He was very good at it and was able to get many websites up in the top of Google. But sales were down and they were just not getting enough SEO packages sold. I had a conversation with his sales rep and discovered much to my astonishment, that whenever the sales rep had fully CLOSED the prospect, to the point where they were willing to hand over their credit card details and pay, you know: “shut up and take my money!”, she was not allowed to close them. Let me repeat that. She was NOT allowed to take their payment. Instead she had to turn them over to the SEO Manager who would then do some research and prepare a proposal for the prospect to read and sign and THEN be closed again to pay!
That is backwards! You do a proposal BEFORE you go in for the close! Altered sequence!
And it doesn’t stop there, when I brought this to the attention of the owner he did not want to change it! His rationale was that it was a way to filter out the serious prospects, by making them wait, and he didn’t want to be bothered to take the time to write custom proposals unless they were closed.
It’s too bad because 50% of the prospects who were ‘closed’ initially dropped off, because of the added time, so by that, their sales were reduced by 50%.
At the beginning of this section I said: “There is ONE thing that you have to have before doing ANY form of marketing which if you don’t, it will fail”
Before any marketing campaign this is the first step, the first thing in any procedure or process: customer survey, research and market data. It is fatal to not do that first. We have a whole section dedicated to that at the end.
It doesn’t matter if you’re posting on social, sending emails, doing ads, direct mail… that step must be always done first.
If you’ve dumped money into internet marketing and got no results, you can rest assured that you had: altered sequence!
Action items:
- Write up checklists for all the marketing campaigns you run, noting each step from beginning to end
- Try to spot any inefficiencies
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