EIGHT SELF-DEFEATING BEHAVIORS CRIPPLING YOUR MARKETING... AND HOW TO GET RID OF THEM AND MAKE MORE MONEY!

Stationed as I am in the marketing lighthouse, I daily see supposedly intelligent business people literally throwing their money away by engaging in a series of entirely self-defeating, completely avoidable self-defeating marketing behaviors. Indeed, so severe is this problem I've now come to believe such behaviors are more prevalent among businesses than the kind of unrelenting, client-focused behaviors which ought to distinguish any enterprise.

See for yourself: how many of these behaviors characterize your efforts?

Self-Defeating Behavior #1: You're Condescending

Some might argue that all this was merely his attempt to establish some kind of rapport. I see it, instead, as a subtle form of the condescension which is all too prevalent in business today. Other manifestations include:

## not returning phone calls, even when you indicate they are most important;

## not answering your letters in a timely fashion, if at all;

## promising things you cannot or will not deliver;

## not looking at your customer when you're talking to him;

## allowing yourself to be endlessly interrupted while talking to a customer;

## allowing your customer to stand by while you gossip with others.

As customers, all of us have been victimized by such endemic behaviors. What's worse, as business people all too many of us perpetrate them. Customers are the people who make us entrepreneurs wealthy. As such they deserve our utmost, concentrated attention and not the witless condescension which today characterizes so much of American business.

Self-Defeating Behavior #2: You're Not Prepared For The Marketing Response You Get

Closer examination showed that:

## she had no proven response package... in other words she'd never bothered to see if what she was sending out actually worked;

## she'd farmed out the responses to a series of people who were to make the closes... but who had received no training at all in how to do so;

## she'd never bothered to listen to or instruct the people she'd selected to make the closes. She had, that is, no idea whether they could do so... or, indeed, any idea about what they were doing.

Net result? She was in despair about the process. In truth, she should have been in despair about her own methods, because it was her own failure to create an organized, tested closing process that produced the truly disastrous results she experienced.

It never ceases to astonish me how little marketers consider the entire process of marketing, how little attention they give to each necessary and inevitable component of a successful marketing effort. While large amounts of time may be given over to the consideration and production of marketing copy, only a fraction as much is devoted to such essential elements as where and how this copy should be used... how responses should be tabulated and logged... how responses should be followed up... and what further follow up there should be beyond this. Yet each of these is a crucial component of profitable marketing.

Consideration of these issues should take place before -- not after -- you execute any marketing tactics. You need to walk through and consider in the most focused way each element of the entire marketing process. Otherwise, you'll end up like the ELM marketer I talked to the other day who spent a very large amount generating leads... and nothing on the package to close them. He was surprised that he closed so few of his prospects... but no one else could possibly be.

Self-Defeating Behavior #3: You STILL Don't Know The Difference Between A Feature And A Benefit And STILL Keeping Trying To Sell Features

But I ask you: who can make company better off: the company itself, or its customers.

Obvious, isn't it? And that's why every business, for every one of its products and services, needs to concentrate on benefits -- which are of interest to buyers -- and not features -- which are nothing more than descriptive components of what the company is selling.

Think of it this way: a feature is like a sentence beginning "I have..." or "It is..." "I have a location at 308 Main Street." Or "It is three inches high." Interesting as these facts may be to specialists, they rightly elicit from prospects the deflating "So what?" response. "What's in it for me, cub?" That's where the benefits come in. Benefits are sentences beginning with the far more motivating words "You get..." This is what your prospects want -- not facts about you -- but things they get. That's why you need to turn every feature into a client-centered benefit. How about that location on Main Street? "You get free parking at our easy-to-reach location at 308 Main Street, right in the center of town." The fact, in short, of no intrinsic interest or value in itself, has now been transformed into a client-friendly motivator.

Which is just what must happen with every feature for each one of your products and services.

The sad fact is that most so-called "marketers" can't do this... which is one major reason they have such a hard time motivating the numbers of people they need to buy their products and services.

Self-Defeating Behavior #4: You STILL Don't Provide A Cogent Reason For Your Prospects To Take Immediate Action

"Act now," you're saying, "and get not only this BENEFIT... and this BENEFIT... and this BENEFIT... but also this SPECIAL OFFER with its MEANINGFUL BENEFIT." Now you stand a reasonable chance of getting the slothful, and all too often cash-poor consumer, to take faster action. Note: have you noticed this recession just how creative many offers have become? These people have made a calculated decision to do whatever it takes to get through this distressing period of our lives as comfortably and profitably as possible. If you're not doing this, you're apparently decided to slice your wrists and quietly bleed to death.

Self-Defeating Behavior #5: You're Unwilling To Assume Responsibility For Acting

Leave a message?" What I've discovered in many instances is that this grandee doesn't need to be involved in the reckoning at all. You may simply be calling for "inform-ation." You may have the most basic of questions that anyone with a grain of intellect could answer. Why then must you leave a message?

Your message must be left because the marketer hasn't adequately thought through what he needs to do and what members of his staff can do.

These days too many of my once proudly self-reliant countrymen now do a self-defeating dance of responsibility avoidance and irresponsibility. Sure they could tell you what you want to know... Sure they could find out. But it's "not my job." And so they don't, thus throwing the all-important prospect/customer into limbo.

Thus, make it your credo that you will not only assume responsibility yourself but instruct those in your operation about how they, too, can act in a way that expedites the closing of business. This is never just the responsibility of a single person in an organization -- unless there is only a single person in that organization. It is always the responsi-bility of all, and the sooner this is generally recognized and implemented the better.

Self-Defeating Behavior #6: You're Slow To Respond

Four days later when the first provider finally returned my call, I told her she was long out of luck. Predictably, she did not express her regret about her inadequate business practices; instead, she drawled something about needing a rest! Really, it's no wonder we're in the middle of an interminable recession with attitudes like this!

These days, with the advent of the computer, modem, all- pervasive telephone systems, fax and overnight mail services, there is absolutely no reason why every request cannot get the exact level of responsiveness it requires. To gather further details or respond with simple information, call immediately. When the prospect needs more detailed and lengthy information, a fax is tailor made. On the other hand, when you need to get bulkier information to the client, depending on the seriousness and potential value of the assignment, an overnight or second-day air service may be called for. In short, there is absolutely no reason why the response cannot be as quick as the seriousness of the prospect calls for -- and as thorough.

Yet, as we all know, this isn't at all what happens. Call most businesses today and you'll quickly learn just how deplorably lax their response practices are. Yet these are the very people who bemoan their cash flow and cannot seem to fathom why their sales are off. Sure, an adverse economic cycle takes its toll. But lax response practices weaken and kill in all seasons.

Self-Defeating Behavior #7: You're Afraid To Talk Directly To Your Prospects And Gauge Their Intentions

This is a mistake.

When you become as aggressive a lead generator as I am, you will quickly come to learn about the large numbers of people who respond to waste their time (which doesn't matter) and yours (which does) answering everything. Such people are business parasites and ought to be rigorously rooted out.

There are many reasons why they're not, including:

## a misdirected courtesy. Many business people reckon that if a person says he's interested, we ought to take him at his word and behave accordingly. I do not agree. Only real prospects deserve your serious attention and investment.

## a fear of upsetting the prospect. Real prospects want you to be focused. Parasites simply want to weaken you. When you seek to ascertain from a real prospect whether he really wants the benefits you have available, he under-stands what you're doing and approves. After all, he doesn't want to waste his time and money either. Parasites get irritated, because when you prove them frivolous, they must go. No wonder they huff and puff when you cut to the chase.

## fear of rejection. When you get focused with prospects, you risk rejection. Get used to it; that's just the way it is.

## thinking sending "information" is your job, rather than closing prospects. Sending "information" is never anyone's job; indeed, mindless mailing of information packets is to be avoided whenever possible. The job is always to offer the most focused client-centered benefits and to figure out if the prospect is interested in them and has the ability to acquire them now. That's all that marketing is or ever will be.

Your job is to generate the maximum number of prospects with the benefits you have available and with a highly motivational offer... and then to talk directly to the prospect and see if he wants to do what it takes -- if he even can do what it takes -- to acquire them. The most focused you are, the more you have a right to insist that the prospect be equally focused and prepared to deal with you directly.

Self-Defeating Behavior #8: You Don't Treat Routine Marketing Tasks In The Most Efficient Fashion

The Objective of profitable marketing is to create a process that:

## identifies the right prospects for what you're selling, namely the people who want the benefit you're selling and have the means to acquire it;

## identifies them in sufficient numbers to meet your profit quota;

## markets both motivating benefits and offers;

## responds in increasingly efficient ways thanks to better use of improved business machines and office procedures to close more prospects, more promptly.

Towards this end, you should concentrate on handling all routine marketing tasks as efficiently as possible. But, you, say, I AM! I doubt

it... Have you, for instance, fully integrated the computer into all your marketing activities? That is, when a prospect calls, do you have the correct response immediately available on computer? When you need to follow up, is that letter on computer? If one of your employees makes telemarketing calls, is his script on computer? How about boiler plate for proposals and contracts? In short, it all should be immediately accessible on computer. If it isn't, you're not as efficient as you can be.

Do you have a computer record where you log all your marketing activities, the dates you did them, the responses, the results? Or are you continually playing guessing games with this crucial information, like an organization I know which can never tell you which marketing gambits have worked and which have not, because the director of this business absolutely refuses to get organized and use the technology and people at her disposal? One of the crucial things I have learned about marketing in the last fifteen years is how important it is to establish a profit-making process, a set of simple and easy-to-run procedures which predictably bring in money and regularly bring you closer to the degree of wealth you desire. While a certain dash of creativity may well have been necessary to establish this process, more mundane and predictable traits are called for to perfect and administer it. Unfortunately all too many "marketers" give way to the siren song of "creativity" seeking instead of perfecting client-centered benefits, motivating offers and a process of prompter turn- around and focus. This is a serious error. But like the other errors outlined here, it's one you are now saved from making!