Why ‘good enough’ is often all you need in your marketing

Graham McGregor is a marketing advisor. You can get his free marketing guide ‘The Plan B Sales Solution’ at www.simplemarketinganswers.com

OPINION: Many years ago I wrote a booklet called: ‘The 7 biggest mistakes that salespeople make and how to stop them losing you sales every week’.(I was well qualified to write this booklet because I had personally made all seven of these sales mistakes many, many times.)

My booklet was very basic. It was printed in black and white and had a photocopied cardboard cover that I folded over and stapled together myself.

I gave this short guide to 50 sales managers as a free gift (some were clients and others were people I had met but had not yet bought from me.)

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Twelve months later I had a phone call from the training manager of one of the major banks here in New Zealand.

The training manager told me she had read my ‘7 sales mistakes’ booklet and liked my ideas.

She explained she was looking for sales training material for the bank and wondered if she could meet with me to see what I had.

A week later I showed the training manager and her colleague the various sales training programmes that I had for sale.

She looked at all of them and said ‘We would like to take all of these programmes, do you take Visa?’ I was happy to oblige and within a few minutes we had concluded a large sale.

I then asked the training manager ‘how did you get my 7 mistakes booklet?’ as I knew I had never given it to them. (And the bank had never been a client.)

She told me that they had found my 7 mistakes booklet in the desk drawer of a bank employee who had since left the bank. And they had no idea how it got there in the first place.

Now when I think back to this booklet I am actually embarrassed at how poorly presented it was.

However, I used it because in my mind it was ‘good enough’ to start doing something with.

The reason I mention this booklet is that many people think their marketing has to be ‘perfect’ in every way before they use it.

So I have met business people who have spent many months producing something like the ‘perfect’ promotional brochure for instance. It has to have the perfect look and image and words etc. And only then will they consider using it.

I think this is a big mistake because in marketing I’ve learned that some of the things you try will work and many will not.

So I would rather try 10 different marketing strategies in a month that are ‘good enough’.

And then discover which ones work well and which ones don’t.

(Instead of spending a month making one marketing strategy ‘perfect’ and then finding out it only gets average or even poor results when I actually get to use it.)

Three simple marketing strategies you can try this week

1. Send a real letter ‘by snail mail’ to 20 delighted customers. Thank them for their business and offer them a special reason to spend more money on some of your products and services. Make your offer time limited and very compelling. Cost to do this? About 20 minutes to write an interesting letter and maybe $30 in postage. Doing this tells customers you care about them and can often stimulate new sales.
2. Email 20 happy clients and invite them to answer three questions. What do they like most about using your business, what benefits have they enjoyed from using your products and services, and why would they highly recommend them to other people? In exchange for giving you their feedback and permission to use it, offer them a small gift. This could be as simple as giving people who answer these questions a double film pass. You will now have a number of great testimonials you can use in your marketing. Cost to do this around $150 if 5 clients respond to your email.Time to do this about 10 minutes.
3. Send something helpful and positive this week to 10 key centres of influence for your business. A centre of influence is someone who can potentially recommend a lot of new clients to you on a regular basis. Say something like this in the letter.’ Hi it’s Jane here from XYZ business. I’m a big fan of reaching out to local businesses and seeing if I can add value in some way. On that note here is a positive article on XYZ I thought you might enjoy. (With my compliments.) Have a great week. Kind regards Jane Smith’.

Time to do this about 15 minutes and $15 in postage.You’ve now got 10 new business people who know you positively.

Summary

Don’t worry about your marketing being ‘perfect’ before you use it.

Just get into action this week and try something.

I guarantee if you take enough action and try a few different marketing strategies you’ll get some good results.

And many times, ‘good enough’ is all you need to get started.

Action Exercise

Get into action this week and actually use any of the marketing strategies that I’ve been recommending in my Stuff columns.