most reliable media) to having it responsible for nearly 20% of all new customer acquisition. (They now mail 10-million pieces a year). This transformation was prudent, as their original means of acquiring customers stalled, went flat, and has been delivering diminishing returns throughout 2009. They were ahead of the problem instead of having to chase it. The intelligent, responsible entrepreneur, then, will be actively, aggressively engaged engaged with this strategy in three ways: 1: Educating himself, through voracious reading, seeking and processing information, networking, etc. on marketing methods and media that go beyond the one to several he presently relies on, and that he is unfamiliar with. 2: Aggressively diversifying the ways he obtains customers – this diversification, his number one priority of this moment, not a back-burnered, we’ll-get-around-to-it C-list item. 3: Escaping single-category dependence. If your marketing is all online, further diversification online does nothing to mitigate your overall vulnerability and weakness; if your marketing is all offline, further diversification offline does nothing to mitigate your overall vulnerability and weakness.
Essential Strategy #2: Profit Margin Protection There has been a trend tr end in many categories of business, as response r esponse to recession, to buy activity at expense of profitability. profitability. Mid-range restaurant chains went down this path, as example; keeping traffic up by slashing prices and profits…and a number of these chains now teeter on bankruptcy. You are probably not a slave to Wall Street expectations in your business, so you can operate more sanely, if you will. Rarely does the sacrifice of margin to buy business pay, and it is definitely not a sustainable strategy. If you’re doing it, stop. It takes no imagination to slash prices, discount and discount more, and trash profits; any idiot can take this approach, and many do. Prosperity, though, is much more a product of creative imagination that either idiocy or laziness. Get to work on protecting your profits, not sacrificing them. How do your protect profits? It begins with knowing and attending to the correct, critical numbers in your business, for which I would refer you to my book, No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits (Chapter 43). Then, there are many tactics, from altering the source of customers (to get better ie. less price sensitive customers) to new or different products, services; bundling of products and services, and experiences to improved advertising, marketing and sales strategies. Ultimately, you have to elevate the importance of what you offer and do, beyond commoditized or easily compared “stuff”. In fact, in the New Economy, if you insist on being in the “stuff” business, you’re on your way out of business. Space here does not permit comprehensive advice on what to do – that is complex, ongoing, creative process supported by all my newsletters and other communication. But I can, here, tell you what you absolutely cannot afford to do. do. In recent years, I’ve been brought in by two different, significant-sized companies you would know by name, unfortunately late in their 6
