Using Marketing Math To Hit EVERY New Year’s Goal You Set For Yourself With Certainty
Of the four M’s of marketing – Market, Message, Media and Math – the one that many don’t like is the math. Marketing is, at its core, applied psychology plus math; you can get the psychology side really, really right (offers, message, USP, etc.) but totally and completely miss your mark if the numbers side of the equation doesn’t add up; and since the New Year is when most people are setting goals for themselves, you MUST know the MATH side of the equation or you’ll frustrate yourself (and your staff) by constantly falling short of goals – and it’s VERY demoralizing for a leader to constantly set goals they don’t hit. Not knowing marketing “math” also makes it impossible to manage new sales reps, because you won’t be able to work backwards from their goal to tell them how many activities (calls, connections, appointments, proposals, etc.) they will need to conduct to hit their quota; worse, you won’t know if they HIT or MISSED their quota until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Example: A client calls in and wants to know if sending 50 Bad Date letters a week is “good.” I can’t say if it is “good” or not without knowing his specific goals. If he wants to add $1 million to his business and the average client is worth $2,000 a month, then JUST sending 50 Bad Date letters a week is NOT a sufficient plan. At $2,000 a month, he’ll need approximately 42 clients. If his close rate is 30%, he’ll need 142 proposals generated; if 50% of all leads generated are not qualified, not ready to buy now and don’t move to an appointment, he’ll need 284 leads per year and about 7,100 prospects to target per quarter if we assume an average 1% response rate to the campaign each time it’s sent (284 ÷ .01 is 28,400, then divide again by 4 to assume we remarket to that same group every quarter with a different type of lead generation campaign and offer). Based on HIS SPECIFIC GOAL, he would have to send out 546 Bad Date letters per week to hit $1 million in net new business that year if that’s ALL he was doing AND if his goal was to add $1 million in revenue with an average price point of $2,000. Read full article and comment →
This is a discussion I had with a client, paraphrased, that I just had to share. It went something like this…
I have emphatically stated and long taught the importance of FREQUENT and MEANINGFUL communication with your clients as well as key strategic partners and centers of influence (association directors, sponsors, referral partners, etc.). Practically every business I know fails to do this effectively, some more than others. The best way to communicate, I believe, is a well-written MONTHLY newsletter that is printed and MAILED, but I’m constantly fighting the quarterly or biannual newsletter, or the desire to simply e-mail it to everyone. I DON’T recommend either of these approaches because 1) in order for it to be a publication clients look forward to getting, it must have frequency, and 2) e-mail is a very unreliable way to get your marketing out, with as many as 80% of recipients never seeing it, much less opening it and reading it. You also cannot replicate the feel of getting and opening the printed newsletter – and that TANGIBLE communication matters a great deal. 
Here’s a question I received from a client that I get some version of FREQUENTLY:
One of the most productive and useful things you can do to work on your marketing and sales for your IT business is NEGATIVE PREPARATION: think of every reason a prospect won’t buy – every obstacle, concern and issue that causes anxiety – then go to work in preparing your process to address it EARLY and, ultimately, address it, minimize it and hopefully eliminate it.
John Edwards, the psychic medium known for talking to people’s dead relatives, makes millions selling tickets to two-hour events all over the world where he performs (key word: PERFORMS) his psychic feat to people wanting to believe in the afterlife, the ability to connect with lost family members and who have an intense curiosity to discover if he’s the real deal. What he’s actually doing is called a cold read, where a “psychic” can propose a vague statement (“I sense someone with a G or a J name…?”) and then watch for confusion OR confirmation, asking the subject to interpret the image he’s seeing. This is exactly what Chris Voss describes as a “label” in his book Never Split The Difference. You make a statement (“It seems like you’re uncomfortable about the price?”) and watch their reaction. Either they agree they ARE, which opens the discussion, OR they CORRECT you. Either way, you learned something.
When you want to show how filthy rich and successful you are, details matter. That’s why you need to have gold-plated staples, sold in packs of 24 for $175. Or how about a Tiffany tennis-ball-canister … for $1,500? And if you really want to show off on the courts, you can hydrate yourself with a $60,000 bottle of Icelandic glacier water that has been mixed with 5 milligrams of real gold dust. ALL of these are real products that people really buy.
One night in 1936, Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma, sat in his office trying to figure out how to get customers to buy more groceries. Observing clients as they shopped, he noticed that many of them were struggling to carry the normal shopping basket provided, particularly the moms with kids. Once they got to their limit of what they could carry, they stopped shopping. That’s when he came up with the idea of the first shopping cart with wheels.
I WISH I could show you the marketing example I’m about to tell you about, but I must have accidentally thrown it out. It was an EXCELLENT example of why you need to be meticulous about cleaning and validating your lists BEFORE you send any kind of direct mail campaign to it. It was a rather elaborate (expensive) mailer sent to my OLD address advertising pool maintenance services. For starters, the address is over two years old, which shows they didn’t run this through the NCOA (National Change Of Address). Second, they didn’t verify I was a pool owner. Yes, I am NOW, but the letter was mailed to the OLD address where we didn’t have a pool, and my name is not on any “pool supplies” website or list because I’ve never bought pool supplies. We get everything through our current pool company. My guess is they simply rented a list of higher-end homes in the area and mailed it instead of renting a list of people who have purchased pools supplies, toys, tools, etc. Just wasteful and stupid. That’s probably why it was the one and only promotion I’ve ever received from this company – it “didn’t work.” 
At every Rapid Implementation Workshop (
There is no doubt about it: Robin Robins has helped more MSPs and IT services businesses to double – even triple – sales, profits and MRR growth than any other marketing consultant in the IT services industry, period.As a trusted advisor to over 7,000 IT services business owners for over 12 years, Robin knows a thing or two about what it takes to grow sales, recurring revenue streams and a profitable client base for an IT services business.