RAMPANT SALES PREVENTION: Short-term fright drives irresponsible reductions in marketing

Now is the time to take market share. When competitors retrench, methodical marketing opens and seizes ripe opportunities to grow and grow significantly.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it ain’t so for many furniture companies. They are unwisely cutting, even slashing marketing muscle to save money, figuring all they need to do is wait-and-see then pounce when business picks up.

Now is the time to act, to be firmly in position with continuous high visibility when business finally improves. At that time, it’s too late to play catch up and hope customers will respond.

Hope is not a strategy. In the race for business, you need to running, not walking or crawling or dozing.

Of course, fright produces potentially disastrous consequences. The illogic and myopia is classic sales prevention better known as bad decision-making.

Going on a radical, starvation marketing diet to reduce costs constitutes weakness, perhaps irreparably.

It would be the same as cutting lean muscle to lose physical pounds. Which it would do all right, but you’d be demonstrably weaker and need to work harder and invest more time and energy to regain the strength lost to irrationality . . . if ever you could.

Just as top Olympians always train and remain strong and in shape, so should mercantile athletes. Staying on top of your business game is all about reallocating precious funds to maintain awareness.

You can’t win by just getting by. You win by getting customers to buy from a dynamic business partner with the tools in place for sustained success.

For too many furniture executives, the activity of sales runs roughshod over the accomplishment of a continuity of methodical marketing efforts, which is investing in telling your story and telling it often.

The common belief, and it’s a myth, is all that’s necessary is to dispatch the sales troops and sell, sell, sell. That’s all that’s necessary because selling is what business is all about. Wrong!

Selling requires a variety of tools, and those implements are what marketing delivers all the time: before, during and after the sales call.

With only limited tools, selling resembles a pebble tossed into a pond, after the splash, the ripples eventually attenuate until the next splash.

Splash selling is throwing away good money. The cost of splashing is greater than the constancy of methodical marketing which is a form of spreading bread on the water.

Only an integrated approach of information attracts and keeps busy customers in the know.

Proactive marketing — especially in tough times — trumps retrenchment. Engage your customers with the character and achievement of constant awareness from many directions and sources — electronic, direct mail, collateral material, public relations, marketing communications.

Stay in shape. Identify your strengths, virtues and achievements, and tell your business story wisely and often.

Reflexively and irrationally chopping marketing costs is a hard ax to follow.

Comments

[Calidad]

It is so disappointing to witness the delight of a major retailer when his small comptetitors close their doors.

He sees this as an opportunity to be a bigger bully and can't conceive of ways to deploy a marketing approach to attract customers that may have been inconvenienced by the closing retailer.

Why not work with the closing company to develop a marketing campaign and honor service agreements and warranties? How about transisitioning staff?

Certainly there are barriers to such an approach but it might be a way to attract loayal customers and gain some star employees.