The Five Principles of Brilliant Sales & Marketing

Monday, October 15, 2007

Alex Hiam and Celia Rocks, http://Alex Hiam and Celia Rocks

1. Never miss an opportunity to present yourself well. Every contact with the outside world is a marketing opportunity! We know some entrepreneurs who always dress well, carry sophisticated business cards (in an attractive case,) and make a special point of smiling, listening and making a good impression wherever they go. Those are the ones whose businesses have doubled in size every time we bump into them.

2. Spend ten minutes a day marketing your company. Marketing is a practice, not a one-time thing. You can't get marketing-fit by working out once a month. We recommend that you take the first fifteen minutes of every workday to think about and work on your marketing.

3. Know what makes you special to customers and prospects. If you are in business today and have customers who make purchases, there is something special about you or your offerings that is motivating them to buy. But what? What is your greatest strength, what marketing asset shines forth and catches the customer eye? We usually find that marketers and managers are not fully aware of their greatest marketing assets and as a result are not using their limited sales and marketing resources effectively. Try to focus on and communicate your greatest strengths whenever you do marketing.

4. Sort out the prospects who don’t want or can't buy what you’ve got, -and eliminate them right away. Finding polite ways to avoid the poor prospects is essential. Every time you make a sales call on someone who isn't ready to buy, or send a mailing to someone who doesn't have enough money to buy, you are wasting your marketing resources. Screening for the highest-quality leads is perhaps the single most powerful way to boost sales and profits in the short term.

5. Simplify your growth strategy. If your plan is complicated, you aren’t done with it. The best marketing is blindingly simple. Every time we encounter a complex, confusing marketing plan or set of product offerings, we have learned to recognize the symptoms of excessive complexity. Success in business always comes from simple, powerful ideas and strategies. We like to reduce a client's varied activities and strategies to the one, single, powerful idea that can unify all they do and give it "legs" to travel forth in the marketplace and bring back new business.

Alex Hiam, author, Marketing for Dummies and Marketing Kit for Dummies
Celia Rocks, technical editor, Marketing for Dummies and Marketing Kit for Dummies.
The authors are available for consultations.
Please see "About Us" on the home page of www.insightsformarketing.com.


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