Top Five Beat the Recession Marketing Missives

Look for holes – Take a hard look at your lead/demand generation and sales processes, programs, people and information. It is important that you are totally objective during this review – if you can't be objective, bring in a professional facilitator who is. Look for inefficiencies, out-dated information, assumptions being passed off as fact, broken or missing processes and be aware of people who simply won't follow the process. When times are good, you can get away with sloppiness. When the business cycle ebbs, it's time to tighten up your efforts and maximize each opportunity.


Tap the sales team – Your sales people are an often neglected gold mine of current market and competitive information. At least they should be. If they don't have the goods, you just discovered a major hole (see #1). The sales team should be talking to customers and asking questions about future and current needs as well as uncovering any potential negative issues that might impact your revenue in the coming months.


Step up direct sales – I've found the most least expensive and most efficient way to build a pipeline is cold calling. When done correctly, sales people can quickly set meetings and generate results. Keep in mind, cold calling isn't about making the sale – it's about starting a conversation. And a conversation is the first step in any sales process.


Step up lead generation programs – A recent study showed that companies are reducing branding programs and increasing direct marketing as a response to economic conditions. Direct marketing is more measurable and gets to the heart of lead generation – stimulating response. It's a good idea to combine branding with direct marketing for maximum ROI.


Get back to basics – When it comes to marketing and sales, it's easy to take your eye off the ball and get distracted in doing “projects”. Take a step back and look at the reasons customers buy from you – how they measure your value compared to your competition. Dig deep and go beyond “price” or “because we are awesome” and get to the heart of why they buy. Think about what pain you resolve. If you can't see the forest for the trees, get some help. The goal is to be more relevant than your competition.

I couldn't have said it better.

Seth Godin's Top 10 Secrets of the Marketing Process
Try these 10 ideas to get you started down the path of scientific marketing tactics:

1. Don’t run out of money. It always takes longer and costs more than you expect to spread your idea. You can budget for it or you can fail.

2. You won’t get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it.

3. Convenient choices are not often the best choices. Just because an agency, an asset or a bizdev deal are easy to do doesn’t mean that they are your best choice.

4. Irrational, strongly held beliefs of close advisors should be ignored. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like your logo.

5. If it makes you nervous, it’s probably a good idea. If you’re sure you’re right, you probably aren’t.

6. Focusing obsessively on one niche, one feature and one market is almost always a better idea than trying to satisfy everyone.

7. At some point, you’re either going to have to stick to your convictions or do what the market tells you. It’s hard to do both.

8. Compromise in marketing is almost always a bad idea. Extreme A could work. Extreme B could work. The average of A and B will almost never work.

9. Test, measure and optimize. Figure out what's working and do it more.

10. Read and learn. There are a million clues, case studies, books and proven tactics out there. You can't profitably ignore them until you know them, and you don't have the time or the money to make the same mistake someone else made last week. It's cheaper and faster to read about it than it is to do it.

Right on, Seth.