Sales and Marketing RESULTS
COACHING
CONSULTING
SPEAKING
WORKSHOPS
Growing Your Business
The Advertising Formula
The Marketing Pyramid
Conquer Your Competition
FREE Newsletter -
FREE Audio CD on more effective ads
SMART A.S.S. Marketing
Jeff Bell -
© 2009 SalesandMarketingResults.com
Never Forget Whether You Like It Or Not You’re In The Marketing Business In Addition
To Your Real “Business”, So Best You Learn How To Be Good At It. -
Doesn’t it seem like something big always seems to happen at home whenever you go
on vacation? Last October a 10-
My fitness center announced it was closing it’s doors after barely 2 years of existence. My chiropractor next door to the fitness center decided to close his doors too. And the hair salon next door to the chiropractor, who was also the landlord / owner of the building that housed all three businesses, announced she was shutting down her business and selling the building.
Most Small Businesses Fail...
Most Means Over 90% In Less Than 5 Years
In the grand scheme of things closing businesses is not that uncommon. You hear about the big public ones in the news. What you don’t hear are the thousands of these “small business” events weekly. You know the statistics from the SBA.
In 5 years 90 out of 100 businesses go bankrupt, close or die a quiet death. In 5 more years for the 10 out of the 100 that stayed open, only 1 will make it to year 10. Only 1 out of 100 live to their 10th birthday. So the life expectancy of any small business isn’t much to start with.
But what hit me with these 3 businesses closing was I knew all the owners. All nice people. Good at their profession. The chiropractor was skilled and fixed my back pain dozens of times. The fitness center owner was loved by all and had top notch equipment in the center. The salon owner, although I didn’t get my hair cut there, was cute, bubbly and seemed to be skilled at cutting, styling women’s hair.
Yet their common failure was they all never “got it” or really understood they needed to be in the marketing business as well at their other daytime business.
I know this because over the years I had talked to all 3 about creating marketing systems for each. My motivation for helping the fitness center and chiropractor was not so much to have them be clients as it was to ensure I could literally walk across the street and workout or have my back cracked anytime I needed.
Past Success Doesn’t Always Equate To Current Success
The owner of the fitness center, who even had another facility about 15 miles away, made several marketing mistakes. Among them buying mobile billboard advertising that ran as far as 15 miles away (most gyms draw their membership in a geographic radius far smaller than that). His initial traffic into the gym wasn’t bad but in selling he only closed 30% or 3 out of 10 into memberships. Still membership grew but peaked far short of his break even point & then declined.
Because their was not a sales system I laid out a comprehensive program for increasing
the close rate on first time visitors, plus a new member program for getting members
coming to the gym regularly and an ongoing communication program for getting non-
I even showed him a strategy for joint venturing with other local businesses so they would bring him members at little or no cost. The irony was in my meetings with him, his response was always, “Thanks for this, I know I need to do these things but I’m so busy working IN the business I don’t have time to work ON the business”.
I repeatedly nagged him to have one of his staff at slow times to go through their
paperwork and create an Excel list of all the members emails and I’d even send out
a monthly e-
Ongoing Communication To Your Customers
Is Part Of Any Marketing Program
Sadly the only time he ever really did anything to communicate with his members was one mailing 2 weeks before he locked the doors telling everyone he was closing down the facility.
The chiropractor wasn’t much better. He couldn’t produce a customer list after asking him to for over 2 years. Neither of these owners ever got it through their heads that they were in the marketing business, whether they liked it or not, in addition to being a fitness center or a chiropractor.
They never understood the difference between working IN the business and working ON the business. As a result their businesses ended up another SBA statistic, dead well before their 5th birthdays.
MARKETING POINTS:
1) Unless you’re the only game in town, regardless of whatever you do, make or deliver you need to be a good marketer.
2) This means you need to educate yourself on marketing’s 3 main activities of advertising, selling and servicing your customers.
3) On average, failure to become a GOOD marketer means having average market share, charging average prices, creating average profits and living an average lifestyle.
4) Failure to do ANY marketing means you become a statistic, dead before your 5th birthday.
5) Understanding and becoming GOOD at marketing helps you to grow market share, charge premium prices, command high margins and have your company fund an affluent lifestyle.
Make time to step back and work ON your business, not just IN IT. Learning as much as you can about marketing is a good place to start.
Jeff Bell | Sales and Marketing Results | PO Box 267 | Noblesville, IN 46061
(317) 713-