M. Bruce Abbott
Creative Director/Partner
Radio Lounge
http://www.radioloungeusa.com

1. Can you identify the best customers to sell to now and in the future?

2. Do you know what kinds of products and services they want?

3. Can you compare your products to your competitors’ products in terms of price, delivery, key features, and model by model? Can you do the same for the industries and markets you serve?

4. Do you know the specific reasons you are losing orders to competitors for every known lost order in the last year?

5. Do you know if you are making adequate margins on each product line, model and job?

6. Do you know your next market and the opportunities and challenges it represents for your company?

We’re in illustrious company because Jay Abraham feels exactly the same. At one of his boot camps I attended the first part of the morning was spent talking about how strategy trumps tactics everytime.

I’ve found exactly the same as you. Business owners try a tactic that they’ve heard from “someone who’s in marketing”. Maybe this marketing person implements the tactic for them.

Then the owner usually complain bitterly that telemarketing or direct mail or radio advertising or magazine advertisng don’t work!

I always tell my clients that the lead generation tools and tactics are the easy part. The mistake that almost every small business makes is jumping into “marketing” without any planning or preparation.

They mistake activity and “doing” for marketing and it rarely works out for them. It leads to this syndrome I refer to as episodic marketing. It’s the same thing your calling the marketing idea of the week.

And then as Jim suggested, the only logical conclusion that they draw is that those marketing tactics just don’t work for a business like theirs.

Gosh forbid that they should ever conclude that maybe it’s because they did absolutely no Analysis & Preparation before rushing into it.

Anybody can get great marketing results if they’re willing to do the preparation and planning work up front!

That said, I have a tip for help putting together a strategic plan. A friend of mine developed a great web-based tool called MyStrategicPlan.com. It takes you through the whole process and is designed to be cost-effective for entrepreneurs, small businesses, etc.

We tried the basic online option a year ago and used it to develop our long-term decisions and business and marketing plans – before we had any customers. It guided us along to think through the right questions, and it drilled down from vision/mission/strategy to timelines and tactics. You can do-it-yourself like we did, or opt for consulting.

We’re lucky because we like talking about strategy and do it pretty often, but that’s not as useful as having the written framework. Going through the full process made us answer questions and research areas we had not thought of. We actually won an award in a business plan competition last year and used chunks of our strategic plan to write the business plan.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve dealt with numerous clients who want to be the hot item of the moment, even though it fails to align with the strategies they’ve supposedly held themselves to.

It pains me to see a company move away from everything they believe it, just for the sake of a short-term flash in the pan.

Good call on the ‘doing’ as that’s what often feels like the actual marketing part.

Thanks for the great post. I’ll use it in future, no doubt.