What is a Coach?

Being a Marketing Coach, I like this quote from the immortal VInce Lombardi.

"A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, and has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you’ve always known you can be."

I've always said that a Coach is both your best friend and your worst nightmare. Your best friend because a Coach shows you the things you MUST do to be successful. Your worst nightmare because once you know what you must do, a Coach MAKES you do it.

Success,
Jim

Randy A Testimonial

If you wonder whether the Principle-Centered Marketing™ Coaching Program is for you, check out what Randy Anderson of Advance Fiber Optics, Inc. has to say.

It WILL Hit the Fan

I’m not an economist. But I am one who does have an incredibly keen sense of the obvious. And it’s obvious to me that IT is about to hit the fan. In fact, IT appears so eminent that this is the second time I’ve addressed this topic today. (See previous post entitled Crahin’ With the Wave.)

In the United States we have enjoyed more than a 25-year period of incredible prosperity. It now looks like that may be coming to an abrupt and possibly a disastrous end.

Oh, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. The seeds of IT were sown decades ago, well in advance of this latest round of rousing success. But it appears the piper is a callin’; the cock is coming home to roost; the bill is coming due. (Maybe it’s long overdue.)

Heard news last week that over 100 banks in the country are in danger of failing, and that is just the beginning. You already know the situation in housing, mortgages, energy and durable goods. You know that food prices are inflating rapidly.

What I’m saying is, we could be in for some very bad years and I want to know what you’re going to do about it. Because you’re only going to have a couple of choices. Fold your tent and go home – if you’ve still got one – or cowboy up and figure out how to survive and thrive anyway.

I’m not inherently a doom and gloomer. I’m not here to assign blame… although if we don’t want IT to hit the fan again in the future, figuring out what went wrong, who is to blame, and what to do about it in advance would be a good idea.

No, my purpose is to help you look at your own situation and help you figure out how to get through it in one piece. Maybe even come out stronger than you were when you went in.

You see, success in the last 25 years has been a relative cake walk. (You may be saying, “what planet did you wake up on, Ackerman?”) But it’s true. If you’ve succeeded, odds are it was far easier than it would have been at almost any other time in our history, whether you believe it or not.

Now I know this may be a jolt to you. You may be sitting there thinking you’re the master of your empire; Mr. or Ms. Hotshot Businessperson. You may believe you built what you’ve got with incredible ingenuity, insight, hard work and brilliance. Well that is undoubtedly partially true. Goodness knows despite the “good times” the vast majority of businesses fail anyway. But the truth is, you’re successful at least in good measure because the whole economy has been successful for an inordinately long time. Not just in the U.S., but globally. You’ve been riding a wave.

Odds are, you’ve been able to get by with less than perfect planning, less than the most effective management, and in particular, less effective, and in some cases completely ineffective, inefficient, misguided or even totally absent, marketing.

Those days are about to come to an end. (Dare I say a CRASHING end?)

Here is my point…

You can never save or conserve your way to prosperity.

You can only innovate and then SELL your way there. Or better said, MARKET your way there.

As bad things happen in the economy, money will tighten. People will have less to spend and they’ll be far more careful about how they spend it. You know it’s true. It’s already happening. You may already be tightening your belt and being more discerning in your buying, both individually and as a business.

When that happens competition will heat up – it must, as your competitors and you desperately try to survive. Because strategic thinking has not been part of the equation in the past, everybody will turn to short-sighted, quick fixes. That usually comes in the form of discounting and price-cutting to maintain market share. Of course, margins go down when that happens, further stressing the structure of everything. You may very well get caught up in this whether you like it or not, because when everybody else is lowering their prices, it’s very difficult to maintain yours. Many in your industry will go belly-up.

Again, to belabor the obvious, when everyone’s in trouble, everyone’s in trouble.

So, what are you doing today, to make sure you’re not one of the statistics? How are you preparing yourself to MARKET your way through the treacherous shoals of the coming recession – or even depression?

My suggestions…

1. Don’t wait till tomorrow. Clear an hour TODAY to begin looking realistically at your situation from a worst-case scenario point of view.

2. Take a look at the current state of your marketing plan. If you don’t have one, you’re in trouble. If you don’t use the one you’ve got, you’re in trouble. If it is based on false assumptions, you’re in trouble. If your plan doesn’t have aggressive strategies to differentiate yourself from the competition you’re in trouble. (I’m just getting warmed up here. I could go on but for the limitation of the word count.)

3. Take a look at your internal marketing resources, talent and education. I’m not talking about MBAs, I’m talking about practical application. I’m talking about real experience with getting people to buy. I’m serious. If all of your marketing people are highly educated brand builders, you’re in a world of serious hurt. You’d better find some people who know how to SELL! And that goes for your ad agency relationships, if you have them, as well.

4. Initiate an aggressive program of marketing preparation. Begin putting marketing contingency plans in place and give yourself a deadline for their completion of no more than six months to a year. If you wait until after the election in November to get these plans in place, it may be too late.

5. Get yourself educated in the areas of customer/client relationship building and retention, up-selling and add-on selling, referral systems, and direct response marketing, among others.

6. If you don’t have the kind of expertise to do these things, go out and find it.

By all means, don’t delay. There is a tipping point and it seems to me it’s approaching quickly. If you’re not prepared ahead of time, you may not have the ability to adjust fast enough to save yourself.

On the up side, preparation – even anticipation – is likely to bring you to the mountaintop. Historically, those who are prepared, and who aggressively “market on”
when IT hits the fan, come out the other side sucking up abandoned market share like crazy and prosper at levels they never dreamed possible. And that’s a place you do want to be.

And one super-colosal last thing. The place to go for the help you need is Ascend Marketing. In particular, take a good look at the Principle-Centered Marketing™ Coaching Program. Yes, we give you a 400% ROI GUARANTEE… Better than any guarantee you'll find anywhere. But what we really give you is CRASH INSURANCE.

THE END

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Ackerman is a Salt Lake City-based Marketing Coach, Writer and Speaker, and developer of the Principle-Centered Marketing™ Coaching Program. Jim will be presenting a series of FREE marketing seminars for local businesses in the coming year. Contact Jim at 800.584.7585 or email him at mail@ascendmarketing.com for times and locations.

Crashin’ With the Wave!

Do you hear that rumble? Can you hear that crash? It’s the sound of the mighty economic tsunami come a-crashing to shore.

And with it the sound of panic-stricken business people afraid their enterprises are going to crash right along with it.

And you know what? In many cases, that’s exactly what is going to happen. And when it does, there are going to be hordes of stunned business owners looking around and saying, what do I do now, how could this happen, it’s the economy’s fault, it’s the President’s fault, it’s Congresses fault!

No it isn’t you whining snits. It’s your own darn fault.

You got all caught up in your own arrogance. You thought your prosperity was your own doing when all along you were only riding a wave.

You got in when things were good. You got in when you could make a killing in your sleep. You didn’t learn business and you didn’t learn marketing. It was all on auto pilot and now that – as they all do – the wave has crashed, you want to blame somebody else.

I’ve seen this in several business cycles. Nowhere is it more evident than in the mortgage lending business, although I must confess that this time it’s worse than I’ve ever seen it before.

Here’s the drill…

1. Interest rates go down. Everybody wants a loan and people flood into the mortgage business to make a killing.
2. Mortgage rates go up. Borrowing slows. The mortgage brokers and loan officers fold like a tent.

Only this time it’s worse. This time, the banks are folding their tents too, and that is killing the whole economy. Everybody loses.

Now the good news. There is still time for you to move to higher ground and save your business.

But if you think you’re going to sit on your duff and do nothing, and survive the coming torrent, there is no hope for you.

Back to the mortgage situation. There are still banks, mortgage brokers and loan officers who are staying in the game. There will be many who not only survive, but thrive through all of this.

And who are they? The ones who are built on a solid foundation and who have learned to consistently and wisely market their businesses.

Same is true for your business. If you’re founded on sound marketing principles, strategies and tactics, and if you’re committed to testing and tracking your marketing efforts to genetically engineer them for ever increasing success. If that’s the case, the coming crash will be a great opportunity for you to ride the next wave here in Utah.

But if you see it coming and you’re not prepared, it’s time to get humble in a hurry. It’s time to change your tactics. It’s time to figure out what you need to do and do it.

Here are some things to consider…

1. What are you doing to fully and consistently educate your EXISTING customers, clients or patients as to the full breadth of the products and services you offer and all the problems you can solve for them? If you have no such effort in place, you’d better get one going while there is still time.

2. As you sell to your current customers, clients or patients, what are you doing to ask them to buy more – in THEIR best interest – at the point of the original sale? Do you have a system in place for doing this? If you don’t you are disserving your clients and it’s going to cost you sooner than you think.

3. How are you cultivating your relationship with your current customers, clients or patients? If you’re not doing anything, again, you are disserving them and you’re going to lose them. When you do you’ll blame it on a lack of customer loyalty, but it will really be due to a lack of CUSTOMER LOYALTY on your part and you will have reaped what you have sown. You must have a systematic program in place to consistently educate and re-sell your clients, in THEIR best interest.

4. If you’re doing all the things above and doing them well, you’re probably on solid ground over all, and you probably have happy clients. That means you’re probably doing a good deal of referral business. Great. You won’t find any better insulation against tough economic times. But have you maximized your referrals by putting in place multiple referral-generating systems, designed to make referrals predictable, instead of incidental. If not, you should. And the sooner the better.

5. Is your product or service so pervasively distributed that you don’t care who buys your product or service, or where, or when? In other words, can your product be bought on virtually any street corner in any store, by any body? If not, stop worrying about “branding” and start focusing on generating a direct response from your marketing efforts. If you don’t know how to do that, find out. I can point you in the right direction, but whether you come to me or go elsewhere, you must find out. (And don’t come crying about needing to build brand. The best way to do that is by having tons of happy, satisfied, consistently-buying customers. Besides, anyone who says you can’t build brand while building a direct response is an idiot.)

What are you doing to advance your marketing education? I find many business people are so terrified by marketing they functionally put their head in the sand and hope it goes away. You may have been able to get away with that while the wave was building. But when it crashes, those who don’t know how to market will find themselves working for those who do.

When the wave is first swelling, you can come a little late to the party and still do very well. When the wave is about to crash, you have no such luxury. When the crest is upon you, you must recognize the situation and act quickly to avoid the wipeout.

The good news is, for those who see what’s coming, you’ll be able to surf the swell ahead of the crash and ride the prosperity you’ve earned to even greater heights in the future, while your less insightful competitors drown in the foaming aftermath of the economic deluge. But you’ll have to be swift and decisive. You’ll have to act to bolster your marketing system now!

THE END

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Ackerman is a Salt Lake City-based Marketing Coach, Writer and Speaker, and is President of Ascend Marketing, Inc. Jim will be presenting a series of FREE marketing seminars for local businesses in the coming year. Contact Jim at 800.584.7585 or email him at mail@ascendmarketing.com for times and locations.

Research That Means a Hill of Beans

Subscribe to this blog for regular, 30-second to 2-minute video marketing tips. This one is on the simple kind of market research that really means a hill of beans.

4 Jobs of Advertising

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There are four jobs any marketing effort must successfully complete of that effort is to be successful. Here they are…

Never Send A General Agency

If you don't want to watch the 2-minute video below, here is the transcript you can read…

NEVER SEND A GENERAL AGENCY TO DO A DIRECT RESPONSE JOB

I’m sorry folks. That almost never works. I mean, once in a while a traditional agency will luck out. They’ll stumble across a slam dunk easy situation where the product and the offer are perfectly positioned at just the right time, and they hit a home run. But it’s all a matter of luck and the agency is incapable of repeating that kind of success on a regular basis.

(Incidentally, the opposite may also be true. You generally don’t want to send a direct response agency to do a strictly institutional or image-oriented ad campaign. I believe strong direct response campaigns do positively impact company, brand or product image, but if that’s all you’re looking for, there may be better ways to do it. On the other hand, the best image campaigns seldom carry any direct response message with them at all, so they can’t do a thing for generating immediate sales.) And general agencies just don’t understand direct response, so don’t ask them to do it.