Actor and screenwriter, Woody Allen is attributed with the quotable phrase, "80 percent of success is showing up.” If you are in sales, you know how true that can be. That’s why sales representatives are encouraged to touch the customer often. But if this maxim is true, what makes up the other 20 percent of success? Let me posture that it is knowing when to step forward and when to step back. It is a matter of being discerning of good timing.

In marketing, there is a right time and a wrong time to approach a customer. Many of your customers may be on a cyclical spending routine and only need your products or services during their busy season. It is easy enough to figure out that your marketing needs to get to them prior to their need for what you are selling. They are like a hibernating bear that sleeps during the winter and wakes up hungry in the spring. Other customers may be a little harder to figure out. And that may have more to do with the individual personality of the key decision makers than it does on any logic around their business.

Timing can be a tricky thing. For instance, let’s say a salesperson is trying to make inroads with a customer who owns a small business. The salesman shows up on Fridays with a box of donuts, figuring that his gesture will eventually result in a sale. He does this for six months. One Friday he shows up, box of donuts in hand, to find his nearest competitor closing a deal with the owner. "What happened?” he inquires of the owner.

"I had a need on Thursday and your competitor made a call on me, made a good offer, so we signed the contract with him,” replies the owner. "Besides, I don’t like donuts!” That story is absurd, but decisions on sales are made every day in this manner. It comes down to timing.

So how can I get an indication that the person in charge of making a purchase is ready to do so? This is where technology is your friend. We use a lot of e-blast campaigns to indicate marketing mood. Let me explain what I mean. An email campaign is built around your marketing message and sent to a list of customers. Let’s say you are selling copiers for office use and you have a list of people who have purchased from you in the past. You have a new copier that is faster and creates cleaner copies. You advertise the new copier in an email with links back to your website which detail the functions and sale price of the copier. You also have an action point where the customer can click and put a copier in a shopping cart and purchase it online. You send out the e-blast to 1,000 people who have purchased from you in the past. The problem is, no one actually buys the copier on the web site. Your boss is about to declare the whole promotion a failure when you venture into the click through stats and find that 500 of those customers opened your email. Of those, 150 of them clicked a lot on the website and spend a lot of time looking it over. Those statistics should tell you something. First, you have only reached half of your customer list and 350 of them were not all that interested in purchasing a new copier right now. However, 150 of them showed great interest. The stats are telling you that the time may be right for 150 customers to buy a new copier. If you are smart, you will follow up with them and complete the sale. In other words, you show up, but you show up at the right time.

Somewhere along the way, beyond Allen’s 80 percent quote, someone said, "There is working and there is working smart.” Today’s marketing technology allows you the ability to work smart.

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Photos by kone / sizovin