The message behind this post can save you from years of frustration and help you dramatically improve your future sales results!

I received an email yesterday, from someone who has occasionally emailed me for marketing advice over the past couple of years.  This person (who will remain nameless for obvious reasons), is one of my newsletter subscribers and has been in business for years as a trainer and author.  She emailed me, asking for some free marketing advice – Before explaining that she was still unable to afford professional marketing help.

By the way, her work is very good and people seem to love her courses, as the feedback she gets is excellent.  She also works extremely hard.

So, we are talking about a hard working person, with a great product – Yet after years of trying, they are still making so little progress that they are unable to even afford a basic, inexpensive business service.

Here’s why:

Hard work is NOT the secret of business success

If it was, our grandparents would have been millionaires!

By working hard marketing her business incorrectly, this lady is like the rower; rowing their boat as hard as they can in the wrong direction. The harder they work, the further they go from where they want to be.

I have to admit, even after 15 years of running a successful marketing business, I’m still amazed whenever I hear an intelligent person say that they have been conducting their own marketing for years with no success; yet they persist in carrying on with no professional help.

Now, I can understand a relatively new business forgetting to put a budget in place for their marketing.  However, when a business has been trading for years, never making any real money because it’s determined not to invest in professional marketing help, that’s just something that makes zero sense to me.

Ironically, these businesses often spend MORE on marketing, than those that have their marketing looked after professionally.

How come?

Because they waste so much money on ineffective marketing:

• They send out mail shots that cost money, but no one reads.
• They buy costly brochures, which achieve nothing for them and in many cases will LOSE them sales because of how they are used and how they are worded.
• The send email marketing to people, which contains ‘pedestrian’ copy and thus fails to inspire people to call them or buy from them.
• They attend dead-end networking events.
• They market haphazardly, with no idea of how to leverage what they are doing so it’s massively more effective.
• They get websites built that fail to convert readers into customers.
• They waste massive amounts of their valuable time building online networks via; Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc – with little if anything financially to show for it.
• They buy advertising, which contains the wrong message, so no one takes any notice of it.
• They make short-term marketing decisions – rather than work from a simple but powerful marketing strategy.

…. and they keep on repeating these mistakes for years; until they either go broke or become too demotivated to continue.

Conclusion

Here’s what I have found: Many businesspeople confuse having the tools to do the job, with having the experience and expertise.  They think that because they have a; computer, Internet access, a car and a phone, that they can market their services.  They just need that ‘lucky break.’

This is like suggesting that owning a surgeon’s operating theatre, means you can perform heart or brain surgery; so long as your luck’s in!

Thankfully, sales and marketing results are extremely easy to measure. If you are getting the sales and profits you want, change nothing. If not, I strongly suggest you speak with a marketing professional.