Are You Making This  Business Mistake?

An expensive mistake that a lot of business people make is thinking that just because they don’t respond to a certain type of marketing or incentive, nobody else will.  I myself used to struggle with this for a long time.  Here’s a perfect example.   Many times businesses use rewards for referrals.  The more referrals you give, the more you are entered into a drawing or other things.

Or sometimes there are cash incentives that you earn or other minor things.  Sometimes the referral can be huge.  But personally, unless the prize has been significant it has never really interested me.  But other people can (and do) get really excited about these incentives.

How do we know this?

Just look around at what other companies are doing.  Subway used to  utilize a rewards card.  Dish Network television utilized (or still does) a $50 gift card for referrals.

Other companies frequently offer incentives for buying their product.  One only has to look at a cereal box to see the prizes that people get if they buy that cereal.

Another example of people thinking that their customers will not respond this way is with long sales letter, or testimonials, or infomercials, or free reports.  Sometimes people say, “I would NEVER respond to that, so therefore my customers won’t.”  Quite frankly, you’d be surprised at what can work and what doesn’t work.  And truly the only way to know if it can work for your business is to create a strategic plan, and then test that plan with enough conditions and a large enough sample size for it to work.

So if someone says my customers don’t read blogs on the internet while that may be true, the fact is that may only be true in a certain situation  Is that only true because the conditions have not been setup correctly?

And if your customers might not read a blog maybe they would read a newsletter.  Or an email series.  Or a white paper.

The real issue, more times than not, is that you have not conveyed the value  in reading, listening, or watching your correspondence quickly enough.

So it isn’t necessarily the type of medias fault, it is your use of the media that is lacking.

Does that make sense?

There is no use in saying, “My customers don’t respond to marketing” if you just send 50 postcards.  The sample size is way too small to test that effectively.  So how can you learn from these mistakes.  One of the best things you can do is look at what other successful entrepreneurs are doing — and here is an important lesson — they don’t necessarily have to be from the same industry.

So how can you overcome this myopic viewpoint.  There are several things you can do.  First, approach every situation with an open mind saying, “maybe…”.  Secondly, think of how you can make things work.  Not how things won’t work for your business.  Anyone can figure out how things can’t work.  There is no skill required in that.

Third, setup a plan to test new methods in your business.  Set aside the specific resources you need to test this plan, and then just perform a business experiment.

Fourth, before you conduct the plan research accordingly by looking at other successful models and acquire the necessary resources and information you need to conduct the experiment accordingly.

It will take way too long to figure out what works if you start from ground zero, but if you start working from a decent baseline of knowledge you can accelerate the process.

So do not immediately discount things that may work for your business.  A lot of money is not made because people pre-judge too quickly.

Sometimes decisions are made on false information or false beliefs when there could be a much easier way to achieve these goals.

And if you’ve come to this website and are reading this article it proves, at least to some extent, that people want to make good, wise, smart decisions and are looking for knowledge.

Until next time,

Matt and Sarah

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