I don't know for sure what your company would get out of better marketing, because it's entirely in your hands, and I can't predict your actions, but here are some of the benefits that my clients have garnered from good marketing over the years. You may like some of them. Let's see...
Offer #1: Better Prospects: Prospects who are pre-interested, pre-qualified and pre-disposed to doing business with your company. Prospects who accept your fees and prices without haggling and agree to your terms of doing business.
Offer #2: Better Clients: Clients who are glad to be your clients, so instead of a mere clientele, you'll have a constellation. These clients appreciate your intention to make a juicy profit because they want to do the same using your help and support.
These clients who don't complain about your company, its people, its products and services. They happily brag to their friends and associates about the experience they've had working with your company.
Offer #3: Best talents: You can afford to recruit the best talents, and pay them better than "competitive(ly low) rates". And the good news is that if you pay your people well, and I don't mean outrageously high salaries, you can expect exponentially better performance from them.
Hint: Double a minimum-wage worker's pay and throw in some low-cost perks (gym, monthly transit pass, Starbucks card, etc.), and his performance increases at least 6-times. True talents don't work for money per se, but they hate being screwed on the money. And they know how to retaliate. And a few of these retaliations can easily tank your company.
Let's remember Peter Drucker's words (The Practice of Management - 1954)...
"Knowledge workers are volunteers who own the means of their performance, and whether or not they remain with any one company is totally volitional. Just like most investors, they will go where they can earn a fair economic return-measured in wages, fringe benefits, and other pecuniary rewards-as well as where they are well treated and respected, the psychological return. In the knowledge society, the most probable assumption for organisations - and certainly the assumption on which they have to conduct their affairs - is that they need knowledge workers far more than knowledge workers need them."
Offer #4: Best suppliers: You can afford to use the best suppliers with the best products and best services. Just imagine... The photocopier dies on your premises at 6:00 AM on Monday, and you can't finish the copies you desperately need for your 8:00 AM meeting with investors.
How long does it take to get the machine fixed? Does the service company slot your request to the front or the back of the queue of waiting customers?
Offer #5: Best external professionals: You can afford to engage the best lawyers, accountants, consultants and other professionals who can help your company to make significant progress in a short space of time.
Offer #6: Security: Even if someone leaves your company, stealing some other good people and some serious intellectual property, there are two things no one can take from you: Your brand and marketing strategy. Just imagine. If someone left Nike and started a new company with Nike's "Just do it" slogan, every piece of that new company's marketing would strengthen Nike's brand.
The imitator's business would go tits-up before you could say Byrger Tidesson, and besides some minor bruises and scratches, your company would escape unscathed.
Offer #7: Market domination: When your marketing is zooming down the entrepreneurial highway like the proverbial M1 Abrams tank, strong, mighty and unstoppable, then both the profession and the market pay attention to you. Some serious attention.
And what about the competition? It thinks twice before trying to get in front of you by invading your market. No one wants to be run over and stamped into the concrete. It would be a rather miserable way of ending an otherwise nice day.
Offer #8: Independence: With good marketing, since your future is not in the hands of a few superstars who can leave you at any moment, you detach your company from market-, economic and people fluctuation. Your hand is on the valve of your company's marketing system, and you set the rate of flow of new clients as you please.
Offer #9: Innate value: With good marketing, your company is actually worth something in case you decide to sell it. Your company's value depends on its innate ability to acquire clients. That's when your marketing is systemised not humanised.
When an owner sells his company with humanised client acquisition, there is a good chance that the best people leave with the owner, and the new owner can go and get clients for himself. And that company is worthless.
Marketing turns a glorified hobby into a real business. And serious buyers want to buy businesses not hobbies. They want of buy cash machines not jobs. But this is important only if you have an exit policy.
Offer #10: Worthy investment: One of the main criteria for investors is the innate ability of the business to land new clients. Clients mean revenue, and revenue means that investors can get their money out of their investments. And they don't want to hope and pray that the best people stay until the investors recoup their initial investments. They need more guarantee than fickleness of some superstars.
Offer #11: Pride and bragging rights: Owners, managers, employees, suppliers and clients would be proud of being associated with your company. People want to belong to winners not losers. And they love bragging to their moms and dads. I certainly do.
Offer #12: Reasonable sanity: You can spend the rest of your life reasonably stress- and worry free. You know that your business is quietly chugging away, giving you the lifestyle that you've always wanted.
Yes, shit still can happen, but there is a world of difference between "shit sometimes happens" and "being up the shit creek without a paddle". We can't avoid the former, but we can prevent the latter.
So, what do you think? Would it be worth investing some time and effort in kick-arse marketing and reap at least some of the above benefits?
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