There have been far too many times when someone in a sales department would say to me, “Our sales suck this month. What can you whip up in marketing and help us meet our numbers?”
And my answer is this: “This month? Not a damn thing.”
You can, of course, slash prices, but that’s a very bad idea. It creates an expectation of future price cuts and it may start a price war with your competitors. It’s bad all around.
Marketing takes time. It takes time to plan, develop, test, and execute. And even after you’ve executed your plan you won’t typically get a “Buy now!” response. If your product or service is big, complex, and not a discretionary purchase, your prospects will need time to ponder, compare, and then, eventually purchase.
And that brings us to the 90-day rule.
There’s lots of science in marketing and advertising. You can find statistics about how many times someone needs to see your logo, watch your ads, read about you, and visit your site before they decide to purchase. There’s lots of interesting stuff there. But it all boils down to this: the well thought out marketing program that you launch today will result in sales, but not today. It will probably take a full quarter. 90 days.
And that’s why you plan WAY ahead in marketing. Yes, there are some times you can get a faster response, but in general, what you market today will result in sales in 90 days.
Have you started your 2015 plans yet? The programs you launch in January should be in development today.
Or you could just slash prices. That’ll work, too.
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Randy MurrayModern Marketing 101: The 90-Day Rule by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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