Marketing Your Business

Sales and Marketing are two of the most critical tasks you must focus on to grow a small or large business. I have coached many business owners who informed me that they are not salesmen and they are not planning on becoming a salesman. I had to remind them that the most important task a business owner has to focus on is sales and marketing.

As a business owner your main and most important job is finding a way to drive sales, getting the phone to ring or getting people to come in the door and buy your product or service. If you do not focus on sales and marketing your business will most likely die.

So, you have two choices. You can either do it yourself or you can hire someone to take care of sales and marketing. Most of the time the best person for sales is the business owner. Compared to hiring someone the business owner has the most vested interest in seeing the business succeed so he or she will do the best job at selling their products or services to a potential customer. Typically the business owner has the most knowledge about their particular product or service also. I almost always recommend the business owner along with all employees focus on sales. Every employee should be a salesmen in one way or another even if it is just telling people they meet or associate with where they work and how great the business is and how great the product or service is, just doing that constitutes sales.

Marketing on the other hand sometimes should be left to a marketing professional since there are so many factors that make up a marketing plan like the message, who the message is for, how are you going to get the message out and so on. Marketing is a science, not an exact science, but a science non the less and it can become complicated and you can spend thousands of dollars and get a zero return on your investment if your marketing is not done right. Even if it is done right you still may not receive the return on your marketing investment you were expecting.

In future posts I will get into more detail about marketing and how to create, implement, track and review a marketing plan but for now one of the most important things you must do with your marketing, whatever it may be, is track it. If you do not track your marketing efforts you are throwing money down the toilet. If you do not track your marketing efforts how do you know those efforts are working or not working. You can not always rely on, "oh it feels like it's working", that is not good enough. Trust me on this that you must track your marketing so you can figure out your return and figure out if you should continue with your current plan or should you make adjustments to your plan or should you change the message or should you change the vehicle etc. More to come.