CHOOSING WHERE TO FOCUS

The Universal Marketing Cycle is a clever diagnostic tool to help you choose where to focus your marketing efforts. The key to marketing success is narrowing your focus to work with just one stage of the cycle at a time, even when you are following up on many possibilities. Think about your own situation as you review the cycle. Where in the system are you stuck? What stage of your marketing needs the most work:

1. Filling the Pipeline—knowing enough people to contact?

2. Following Up—contacting the people you already know, or know about?

3. Having Sales Conversations—getting from follow-up to conversation?

4. Closing Sales—getting from conversation to sale?

In most businesses, contacting prospective clients directly is one of the primary methods of follow-up, so knowing enough people to contact is an easy test to see if your pipeline is sufficiently full. But if you are in a field where direct solicitation of clients is inappropriate, such as psychotherapy or, in some cases, law, ask yourself if enough people are calling you. Another good test is to imagine you were using a newsletter or e-zine for follow-up. How many people who already know you could you send it to?

Do you already know where you are stuck or need more work? If so, skip ahead to the next section, “What Strategies Should You Use?” If not, try asking yourself some questions.

If you answer yes to the following questions, you need to focus on filling the pipeline:

Are you brand new in business?

If you sat down to call every lead you currently have, would you be through before lunch?

Have you personally followed up with every prospect on your list within the past thirty days?

Are you not contacting the prospects you have because you already know they don’t need you or can’t afford you?

Are you in a business where it’s inappropriate to contact prospective clients, and you’re not receiving enough inquiries?

If you answer yes to the following questions, you need to concentrate on following up:

Do you have a drawer full of business cards (or database full of contact information) from people you have met but have not been in touch with since?

Have colleagues handed you leads whom you haven’t gotten around to calling?

Are there prospects who said no or didn’t return your initial call who you haven’t contacted in the past three months?

Do you have a wide network of personal contacts with whom you never talk business?

Are there people you haven’t been in touch with lately who inquired about your services in the past, but weren’t quite ready or didn’t have the funds?

If you answer yes to the following questions, you need to work on having sales conversations:

Do you follow up with prospective clients consistently, but can’t seem to get their attention to discuss their needs and your offerings?

Do people refuse to take your call, or brush you off quickly when you do get through to them?

Are all your prospects already working with a competitor—or at least that’s what they say?

Does everyone you contact seem to think what you do is too expensive, will take too much time, or is just not for them?

Finally, if you answer yes to the following questions, it’s time to focus on closing sales:

Are you regularly getting to the sales conversation stage, but don’t seem to close enough sales?

Do your prospects seem to be going through the motions of allowing you to have a sales conversation, but have no serious interest?

Are you encountering objection after objection that prevents the sale from going through?

Do you often conclude a sales conversation and still don’t know where the prospect stands?