Marketing. We all know we should be doing more of it and making our present efforts more effective. Yet, somehow we do not seem to get around to implementing a comprehensive marketing plan. Every year improvement of our marketing efforts lands among the top goals of all businesses and sales personnel. In reality, how much time do we spend trying to improve our marketing efforts? Perhaps if we understood the following basic laws we could make more progress–

You will do everything else first. Even though marketing activity is what brings business in the door, most business people (including sales personnel) will not make marketing their highest priority. We tend to get lost in putting out fires and paperwork. We all have enough administrative work to keep us busy forever. However, if business does not come in the door, there will be no need to accomplish this work. This sets up what we call the “cycle of sales”–periods in which we have too much business, followed by periods in which we have too little business. This occurs because we market only when we have little else to do and we have no choice. We will refer to this particular phenomenon as marketing reluctance.

The world of marketing ideas from which we can choose is infinite. We could spend days giving ideas to market a particular product. Most of these would represent great business ideas. You can’t accomplish all of these. Your job as a sales person or business owner is to choose the most effective actions and implement these consistently. If you chose too many, consistency will go out the window.

You cannot change the world in one day. If you would like to change the effectiveness of your actions, aim for incremental improvements. If there is not enough time in the day to market effectively now, how could you make wholesale changes in any effective manner? Look for the low-hanging fruit, or small changes that can effect marginal amounts of improvement. This is what we will call synergy, or making changes which require the least amount of your resources in addition to your everyday efforts.

Your marketing activities will not work if you don’t believe. Marketing must be carried out with a positive belief. If you take actions half-heartedly, they will not work and you will be wasting your most precious resources–money, energy and time. Attitude represents the key to implementing any marketing plan. Too many times we give up on a good action plan because we didn’t stick with the plan long enough.

Marketing and sales are not the same. Marketing makes the phone ring. Sales represents the actions you take in order to convert the call into a sale. You must take both actions to succeed. Many do not succeed because they do not possess the sales skills necessary to bring produced leads to closure. Yet, they blame the marketing activities for their lack of results. We do know that some marketing activities may produce leads that are harder to close. The key to a great marketing plan is to produce the best leads possible.

It is not just how many calls. The purpose of marketing is to get the phone to ring or respond in some particular fashion. The ultimate goal of marketing is to produce revenue. Therefore, the quality of responses is just as important as the quantity of responses. More calls will produce more revenue as long as the right prospects respond at the right time. If more responses are produced from the wrong prospects the overall impact upon earnings is likely to be negative.

You won’t convert marketing leads if you don’t ask. All of the marketing leads in the world will not help if you don’t ask for the business. The quality of the lead produced does not matter if you do not ask. Too often we do not ask or follow with the leads long enough to get in a position to ask.

Want to accomplish more effective marketing results? It would not be unusual to find the answer among these very simple rules.