How easy do you make it on your target market – those you are trying to convince to be your customers – to do business with you? One of the jobs of marketing is to make it very easy for new customers to learn what your brand is all about, to buy from you and to make contact with your company if they have questions. Too often I find this process is like making raisins from grapes.

There are certain items my wife and I like to grow in our garden and make in our kitchen rather than buying them prepackaged from the grocery store. In the interest of being transparent, I have never attempted to make raisins. It is a very long and involved process of making raisins from grapes. According to the Sun-Maid Raisin website, it takes up to three years for grapevines to produce grapes worthy of being a raisin. Once the vines are mature enough to produce grapes, there is a lot of hard work in picking and processing them to become raisins. It takes months of toil to do this. However, the biggest reason I don’t make raisins is it is too easy to buy them from a store. Someone has convinced me raisins are a healthy, sweet food option that is readily available in little boxes that are the perfect size for a snack. In other words, I have believed the marketing.

The California Raisin Growers are a relatively small group – about 2,000 farms in a 60-mile radius of each other in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley in California. Years ago they formed a marketing cooperative that informed consumers of the benefits of raisins, promoted their use in recipes and expanded their use in commercial kitchens as a natural preservative and sweetener that is used as a substitute for processed sugars.

Why am I making such a big deal out of raisins? Most businesses are complex. Too often I find companies have not taken the complexity of doing business out of the equation for their customers. It would be like the California raisin farmers saying to the consumer, "Do you know how hard it is to produce what you are eating in mere seconds? If you want raisins, you are going to have to wait until we can get them to you. You may have to stand in line to buy them or find some guy along the road selling them from the back of a pickup truck!” What would you do? Probably find another snack food. Yet that is what happens when you make it too complicated for an interested prospect to become a customer.

Why is this a marketing function? Because marketing is tasked with putting their brand’s best foot forward and then coming up with an easy way for the customer to say yes to a sale. It is also given follow-up tasks of making sure the customer is happy and becomes a repeat customer. Our consumer-driven marketplace demands you make it easy for them to buy from you. That’s what is behind online sales and deliveries to your door. Marketing has to promote the benefits of your brand, but also the way the brand is delivered, where to buy it, how it is packaged and the value of buying it again and again.

Take a marketing lesson from raisins. No one wants to make their own. Take the complexities of your business as an internal process, never to be put upon the consumer. Make it easy for your customers to say yes to the sale.