Small Business Marketing Sucks

In my last post, I talked about how raising prices can actually bring you in more business, reduce your workload and make you more profitable. The reason is simple: raising prices drives away the cheapskate customers. And what’s left are the ones who spend the most.

Another way to accomplish this is to deliberately target customers who spend the most. The idea here is to clone your best customers.

I spoke with Scott Channell on this very topic last week. Scott is an author, speaker and sales consultant – and an expert on setting sales appointments. I’ve been getting his marketing emails and following his advice for the past few years. I was familiar with the concept of targeted marketing, but I never got around to it with my web business. So when I read Scott’s emails on the subject, I decided to try it with my telemarketing department.

I started off by looking at sales from the previous year, 2008, and identifying what types of businesses spent the most money with us. I gave the biggest spenders – attorneys – to my best appointment setter.

The results, shown in the graph below, were nothing short of dramatic. By the end of 2009, we had increased attorney sales by more than 660 percent over the previous year.




Looking at 2009, the next graph shows how dramatically attorney sales jumped in June when we began this strategy.




Targeted marketing works because it makes your efforts more effective. You can be super-efficient and make 150 calls a day. But if those 150 calls are random and non-targeted, your results will be less than stellar. Why not focus your efforts on calling those who buy more often and spend more? We did, and the results speak for themselves.