Timing is key in business, especially if you work in sales and marketing. If you're the master of good timing, your marketing shows up right before a potential client has a need, sales walks in the door and signs a contract. It all sounds like it came from a textbook. Real world sales don’t often happen that easy and marketing to open doors rarely is that clean. In fact, a lot of marketing is an exercise in trial and error for many businesses. Marketing ideas are thrown against the wall to see what sticks. The problem is, in the past few years, customers have not been in the mood to buy and not much was sticking. That may be changing now.

Working your marketing with sales cycles is critical to your business success. Over the past six years, the economy has taken a big hit. A lot of that had to do with the uncertainty of factors that cause people to buy goods and services. It appears that we are beginning to come out of the malaise of an unhealthy business climate. Some sectors are doing quite well again. That’s good news for all of us who are trying to sell products and services. Since the climate for selling is looking better than it has in years, your marketing needs to kick in now. Marketing has to be out in front of the sales cycle in order to work effectively. When the opportunity for sales begin to pop up, marketing has to help open doors to new customers.

How do you do that? One thing I would suggest is looking at what has worked and what has not over the past six years. There may have been some good ideas that were tried at a moment when the market was simply not going to buy anything from you. A good idea at the wrong time does not have much stickiness. Sometimes when marketing efforts don’t produce sales, we tend to think of them as bad methods. That may or may not be true. It could simply be a matter of timing. Take some time and think why a marketing method succeeds or fails. If it catches the attention of your target market, it may be worth trying again.

I remember a restaurant customer we were marketing to several years ago. We were selling advertising space in a program for a large event in Indianapolis. The event was perfect for them because it would put hundreds of hungry people on the streets within blocks of two of their restaurants at noon for three days in a row. They initially turned the idea down. They believed the return on investment would not pay off for them. About a month later, they came back to us and bought the ad space. What was the difference in one month? What we did not understand was their budget and their purchasing cycles. We had asked on the end of one budget cycle when all of their advertising dollars were tied up somewhere else. When their new budget kicked in, they were willing to take a look at our proposal again.