Are you disappointed, even frustrated, with your past marketing/selling efforts? Do you seem to be trapped in a cycle where you "commit" to more deliberate marketing efforts, where you even boost your activity for a while, only to find yourself at your next quarterly or annual or whenever you review your business results, back where you started?
If you want to make your next review of your marketing efforts more satisfying, a little learning can certainly help if you learn about the right thing. Do you need:
- Learning about marketing options, strategies, methods, and so on?
- Learning about how to get yourself to do things you don't want to do?
Ignorance: Fact or Excuse?
If you are just looking into explicit marketing strategies, or new options, for the very first time, maybe you do not know enough to take next steps. But that is rarely, rarely the case ... although it is often the belief, and I'll tackle why that misconception is so common in a later post.
If you have been through a few of these cycles, as have many of the clients I work with -- established, successful training consultants -- you know enough, right now, about marketing and selling to build your business. Yes, you may not be an expert, there may still be many options you know little about.
But you do have options, and if they were implemented, your business would grow. You have knowledge, but it has not been applied regularly enough, consistently enough, to produce good results.
So what do you do next? You probably read some more, listen to some more podcasts. If you're feeling really frustrated or desperate, you sign up for a seminar or course. You try to learn more about marketing.
And that's often just an excuse for not actually doing anything right now ... and maybe not doing anything tomorrow, either ... and ...
Change Behavior
I often write and talk about "workstyle change," the notion that sustaining marketing and selling activity is a lot like "lifestyle changes" such as healthier eating and regular exercise. In the lifestyle arena, your goal may be to lose weight, but the secret is to manage eating and exercise behaviors.
For most of us, that disappointing business review, repeated time and time again, points to the need to learn more about how to manage our own behavior, rather than the need to learn about new ways of marketing, or the philosophy of selling. The good news is that there is not only a lot of information out there about how to do this, you may already have relevant experience. If you have managed to sustain an activity that wasn't inherently pleasant -- diet, exercise, learning some academic subject that will help you in work or life, even major home improvement projects -- you can examine what worked for you. Marketing and selling are just another class of slightly unpleasant activities, for many consultants, that will respond to the same techniques that brought success in other behavior changes.
To give that next review of your business a better score on marketing and selling your services, focus on managing the level of activity, rather than the amount of knowledge, you apply to the problem.
Of course, that is not easy. In fact, we actively avoid that approach. I'll look at why that's the case in my next post.
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