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Start with Reality in your Marketing

Written by: Joe Dager

Article Overview: When your business is in trouble it is safe to assume you have to do something different or you will get the same results. Change must occur. But what do you change to and how do you know that it is going to work. Most poor business decisions are because....

Start with Reality in your Marketing

When your business is in trouble it is safe to assume you have to do something different or you will get the same results. Change must occur. But what do you change to and how do you know that it is going to work. Most poor business decisions are because you lack certain information but can you know everything? You have to proceed and so you must develop a method to make minor changes to decide if it is working and then test the waters.

Most professionals today have not been involved in a recession. They do not realize that a recession needs a different set of skills and management techniques. You must decide on your course of action. Put your toe in the water and test it, then take the plunge and I can assure you that soon you will be swimming in open water. Trust yourself to get to the other side. It is not easy. But you have to take the plunge. Or you will stay on the side you are on now. Recessions are tough. They are all different, requiring different goals and strategies. Start with setting obtainable goals and the results that will define success. Keep it positive! You need things to celebrate and starting with reality is the first.

Strategies that I have seen in a recession are different then many marketing people may agree with. What I have learned is that you zero in on what you do well in every area of the company and put your money in those areas. If you have a pet project or something that is going to set the world on fire, it seldom does. There are not that many Ipods out there. So target, target and target some more and build the best buyer persona that you can to get results.

Do you need a full-scale new business plan now? You probably already have one but are you using it? You might even have Accountant, Attorney, and Marketing Agency that is ready to give you advice. Are you using them? But I will warn you, it takes a different set of rules in a recession. I had an accountant in the middle of turnaround, who was concerned that my light bill was not separated properly so I could allocate overhead correctly. I could not run the business correctly without understanding overhead allocation. He also recommended that we change our entire chart of accounts at that time to get our cost in line. I recommended that we considered the lights as one expense and hope that when we flipped the switch next week the lights still came on. All cost at that point is an expense and nothing more. Simplify your plans.

I use The One Page Business Plan® template for decision making and as a guide not only to start but when to stay in and when to get out. The OPBP is based on these five questions:
1. What are we building?(Time)
2. Why does this business/department/activity exist? (Timeless)
3. What are the specific measures?
4. How are we going to build this company/department/activity over time?
5. What is the work to be done?

If you use these 5 questions correctly, I think you will find them very useful to your organization. Elaborating on each of these questions goes beyond the scope of this article. However, I would encourage you to pay particular attention to question three, “What are your specific measures?” Make sure whatever your objective is, that it is measurable and also that the measures are based on true drivers that allow you to follow the progress. Poor measurements find out to late in the process that something is not working. Also having measurement along the way to an objective allows you to celebrate your successes, the most important ingredient in a recession.

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Article Tags: marketing, poor business decisions



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