Guerrilla Sales & Marketing
Inexpensive & Unconventional Tools & Tactics to Increase Your Small Business Sales
co-author of the Guerrilla Business Book Series
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So why do we need a book on sales and marketing? A fair question with an easy answer. Nearly every year for the past 10 years over 850,000 folks across North America get that entrepreneurial spirit and start up a new business. No kidding, three-quarters of a million new businesses are begun each and every year. Wonderful news! Yes, but the sad part of this news is that, after four years, 62 percent of them are out-of-business! The US Department of Commerce wanted to know why. After all the government was losing potential tax revenue and many taxpayers are going broke. After a thorough review and much field research it was found that the failing businesses all had three things in common:
1. Poor financial planning The US Small Business Administration. in a study completed in 1992, concluded: "For most businesses marketing is critical, vital. If you don't market the odds are your business will fail." This column will not be dealing with financial issues. There are others who have and will take up that calling. Over the next series of columns, we will be discussing marketing and sales issues as they pertain to making your small business succeed, big time! First of all some critical definitions. "Marketing" relates to everything you do with a product or a service to get it sold again and again to your consumers. It's a pretty big field, much bigger than most business people think. Most entrepreneurial folks figure that if they can put together a descent yellow-page ad they've got their marketing pretty much down. Not so. Advertising, including the yellow-pages, is about two percent of your marketing. Of course, it's a very important, and fairly expensive, "two percent," but it's a small fraction of the other critical marketing tools and techniques we'll be discussing in this chapters. By the way, many of the guerrilla tools and techniques will cost you nothing. With the others, we'll show you how to save major dollars by being smart. We call it "guerrilla" enlightenment. For example, when advertising in this newspaper don't ever be fooled by the myth of the ad rate card. No guerrilla ever pays rate card rates. Ad rates are negotiated. Now aren't you glad you read this chapters? "Sales" and "selling" are another very important two percent of your marketing. They refer to the face-to-face or telephone communication between you and/or your staff with customers and potential customers. Again, many small business owners decide that if they can say, "Hi, can I help you?" and, following the sale, "Have a nice day," they've got selling handled. Again, not so. "Guerrilla" for us means, not doing it the way everybody else does it. Not doing your marketing and selling with the force of the big bucks those Fortune 500 people have at their discretion. For example, do you have $8 million to spend on some frogs croaking out your business name for the next thirty days? We thought not. Unconventional guerrilla tactics will work wonders for your small business. It's less expensive and demonstrably more effective. It's learning a bit more, it's getting the edge. In today's market, it's winning by a millisecond. Nevertheless, Winning! We regularly see a 50 to 200% increase in the gross sales of firms who adopt the guerrilla philosophy and the unorthodox guerrilla marketing tactics we recommend.
Bill Gallagher is the author of the best seller "Guerrilla Selling". You can view more articles by the author at the Guerrilla Marketing Site. As a convenience to our readers, for more information on the topics and ideas presented in this article please call Guerrilla Sales & Marketing at 1-800-800-8086.
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