Have you downsized your marketing in the past few years? Many corporations have cut back what once were the centers of innovation for selling their wares into a person or two holed up in a cubicle. Marketing departments these days are more like the survivors in some odd reality TV show. But alas, it may be time to dare to cross over to the board room and begin thinking creatively once again. What I am seeing from my customers is a need to get beyond the doldrums of a bad economy and the hope of a fix from an incompetent government. It is time to find a way to sell products and services once again. And to get results, you have to get the marketing right.

It was business guru Peter Zucker who said, "Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” What he meant was that marketing is one of two key functions that drive business in your doors. All your other functions are just overhead expenses. They may be important, but they don’t produce the cash needed to stay in business. Marketing, when it is working right, generates leads which make sales that produce revenue. Marketing pays for itself in spades. But how does that happen? If you are ready to ramp up your marketing efforts, realize that the thinking of the marketplace has changed over the past several years. What you were doing prior to 2008 might not work. The bad economy has given the marketplace a very hard edge. It seems that everyone is from Missouri these days: they have a "show me” skepticism towards purchasing. I was talking with a friend who was trying to make changes to his business. He had gotten rid of several customer perks that were not profitable for his company. He had replaced them with new ideas. His customers were having a hard time letting go of the old ways and adapting to the new. "When you have all the bugs worked out on your new ideas and it is working with someone else, give me a call and we can talk,” said one of his longtime customers. The fallacy to that way of thinking is if no one goes first, your business will dry up and blow away waiting on someone to take a chance on you.

Part of the function of marketing is to get people over this skepticism mountain. One method of doing that is to let the customer experience your products or services for free the first time. Go into any Costco on a Saturday and you will see this technique at work. If you taste something you really like, and you are hungry, the likelihood that you will make a purchase is extremely high. If your product is good, letting someone try it for free for the first time gets past the argument that they are taking a huge chance on something they may not like. It opens the door for the sale – which is what marketing is supposed to do. Think of the products you use on a regular basis. How many of them were first given to you as a free trial product? The shaving gel I use, the toothpaste I purchase, the cereal I eat at breakfast – all of these first came as a free sample. Sample is a key word here. If you do use the free trial method, make sure you are not giving away the entire product. Keep them wanting more. Those servers in Costco just give you a bite on a toothpick, not the entire meal.

If you do not have a product or service that is easily given away, the next best method to getting a customer over their skepticism is a demonstration. For instance, if you have a lawn care company, applying your products in the front yard of a strategically located house in a high-end neighborhood on a Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m. will get the attention of other neighbors. Even better, if you can engage those neighbors in conversation, get them to let you test their soil and give them an analysis of the weeds growing in their yard, you will make a simple demonstration turn into a marketing goldmine. The old Fuller Brush Company made a name for themselves with their door-to-door sales techniques in the 1950s and 60s. Can you imagine making a cold call from one doorstep to another? This was their marketing plan – and it worked. One of the marketing tactics they trained their salesmen to use was a demonstration. My mother used to buy their products because the Fuller Brush man showed up one day when she was cleaning potatoes. He demonstrated how easy it was to clean dirt off of a potato skin with their brushes. A sale was made, and every time he came back, he asked if she needed new brushes. It was all she ever used.