First Step Marketing

As you approach the building on day one, your first balloon is popped. People are not lined up waiting to get in. On entering, you find there are no messages on the answering machine, and two hours later the only call you receive is from your spouse asking how it’s going. As the first day ends your revenues are just under ten bucks. A quick glance at your budget shows that your expenses for that day were closer to a hundred.

Now is not the time to question what went right or wrong. The fact that anybody bought anything from you today may be a great sign. The question you should be looking at is, “What did I do today? How did I spend my time?”

If you spent a great deal of the time watching the traffic go by, doing useless paperwork, or watching soap operas, you should probably get a copy of the employment section of the want ads for tomorrow.

During this start-up period, every minute of time that is not being devoted to a project essential to keeping the doors open must be spent selling, promoting, and planning promotion. Only one of those things you may be planning as a promotion is a grand opening. Many businesses have no need of such an event or cannot gain from it. Others such as ad agencies or beauty shops may want to hold an open house where potential clients enjoy a few snacks and admire your new facility.

If you’re in retail, take ten-minute breaks (with a note on the window “back in ten minutes”) to pass out brochures in the neighborhood. Don’t stand in your doorway and look sadly at the passersby. Be bold, forget fear. Invite them in for a cup of coffee. Give them a coupon for a 10 percent discount next time they come.

Rent a clown outfit and stand in front of your place of business to attract attention. Hire a mariachi band to play in your front window.

When should you start taking all these drastic actions? From the first day. You have expenses. Those expenses don’t stop and wait for sales. Each day you don’t sell enough to pay those expenses puts you one day closer to an unacceptable result of all your hard work and money: going broke!

How should you spend your first day if you are a wholesaler, broker, manufacturer, or sales rep? On the phone, in your car, or on an airplane. You have to be in front of the decision makers. You can spend all your time fine-tuning your equipment, counting your inventory, or meeting with vendors and principals, but none of those activities is going to result in a sale. You need sales! Now!

How about service providers such as doctors, lawyers, and CPA’s? It is the rare professional who isn’t uncomfortable about “selling” his services. It hasn’t been so long since such action was considered unethical or even illegal.

Such is not the case today. The day-to-day overhead expenses of most professionals are among the highest of very small businesses. Besides, each hour that a lawyer or doctor isn’t practicing, the lost opportunity cost of doing so as an employee is very high.

First contact every other member of your profession in your area to offer your services to them. Doctors can commonly benefit from referrals of other doctors who have too large a caseload or who don’t practice in your specialty. Ad agencies may be able to pick up small clients from other agencies. What is unprofitable business to one company may he life and death to a start-up.

Restaurateurs, go out and visit every owner and manager of a business anywhere nearby. Give them a free lunch coupon or two. If your food is good, they will pay for that free lunch many times when they return with employees, customers, and suppliers.

Join local service and professional clubs, the chamber of commerce, charities, or the boosters for the high school. Meet people. Hand out cards.

Visit or call companies with which you have potential synergy. Contractors should leave their cards at the local lumberyards and hardware stores so that a do-it-yourselfer can get a lead for the times he is over his head.

If you are opening a family counseling center, you’ll want to leave your card with area pastors, doctors, school nurses and counselors, and social service providers.

If you’re renting cars, you should be contacting insurance agents, claims adjusters, body shops, auto repair facilities, and hotels.

The negative guys are piping up: “I sell manufactured products to wholesalers. After I’ve called every one twice in the same week, what is left for me to do to help my sales?”

1. Go out and call on the retailers that they service. Do this on your own or with one of their salesmen if possible. Sell product direct to these retailers if you don’t already have distribution in that area or take their order and give it to your customer to ship.
2. Set up a meeting with a group of end users of your product. Find out what you can do to make the product more appealing. Ask them to use the product and come back to you with testimonials. Offer to give them free product in exchange for their help.
3. Offer one or more of your customers a discount on product if they will send out your brochure in one of their mailings. The fastest turnaround would be in a packing slip or invoice.
4. Offer free product to your wholesaler if he will include the free one in each shipment he makes to a customer.
5. Send out the craziest low-cost advertising piece you can think of. We have seen brochures rolled up in tubes, mailed in a bottle, or delivered by Federal Express. Do anything to get noticed.

Let me throw out one more example. Then you should be able to devise a similar list for your business. Let’s say you are a photographer.

1. Look in the paper each night and write down the names of the couples who are announcing their engagement. Call the bride and offer your services. Get your first few weddings at any cost. If you do a good job, the referrals are great. The same is true for birth announcements and major wedding anniversaries.
2. While looking in the newspaper you might even take a look at the photos of executives in the business section. If some don’t look too attractive, call and offer a free sitting to create a professional head shot that will improve their image. This contact may lead to photos for brochures and advertisements.
3. Leave your card with the best four-by-six color picture of a baby you have ever taken at the local baby furniture store, each toy store, and with every OB/GYN in town. Offer the manager or owner a 10 percent commission for anybody he sends your way. If you don’t get anything in a week, offer a 20 percent commission.
4. Go talk to the manager of the fanciest restaurant in your area. Suggest that he let you take pictures of the patrons. By the time they finish eating you would provide them with a five-by-six color photo encased in a folder with the restaurant’s logo on the front. Keep the price reasonable, but get the couple’s name and address. Follow up with a brochure that tells of all your services.
5. Go to local advertising agencies and offer to do their next photo shoot for free. (They only pay for materials, not your time.) You risk one day in exchange for the potential for much future business.

SELL * PROMOTE * SELL * PROMOTE * SELL * PROMOTE * SELL

That is your job and virtually your only job during business hours until you are covering your nut (expenses). Clearly, if you are the one who provides the service, or you must create the product, ship it, and so on, you will have to take care of these things as well. As much as is humanly possible however, do these things at night during this critical time. Sell during the day, run your machinery at night. Sell during the day, type invoices at night, box and ship before eight o’clock in the morning.

Some of you may be able to reverse the process. For instance, doctors, lawyers, printers, travel agents, and other service providers must generally perform their professional services during business hours. However, they should use dead time, lunch hours, evenings, and Saturdays to find folks to sell.

Evenings also provide time for creating brochures, sending follow-up letters, and planning sales calls. Your family is going to scream that you work all the time. Explain to them that if you work very, very hard now, you should be able to slack off later. If you ease up now, you may be fighting for your business life for years.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
The First Day

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 3:07 am and is filed under Advertising, Budgeting, Promotion, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.