A SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC MARKETING

About six months ago I received a resignation letter from one of my sales people that made me stop and reconsider ALL of my Sales and Marketing methods for my business. To say the least, I was taken all the way back to the day I decided to systematize my entire production and service of our company.

This person was a new hire and had come to the conclusion that cold calling was not their cup of tea. The letter was direct and well thought out. It told me how much the person appreciated my company and all that I had tried to do in helping them with their sales effort. It also stated that our company was the most organized; in fact, the most "stellar" company they had ever worked for, BUT...

They went on to say, "Philip, I believe you need to put the same effort and creativity into your Sales and Marketing as you did with building your Operations Manual and System100." They also told me that what we did NOT have in our printing company was good marketing, and we needed to have print buyers call us rather than us cold calling them.

I had to admit they were right!  Ours was a shoot-from-the-hip, shotgun approach to marketing. The truth hurt. I had many systems for tracking sales people, but we had no written systems for marketing.

Well, it was decision time again for me. I was the problem...I knew I would always be the problem until I changed.  I closed my office door and began to consider, how could we market automatically. I found myself saying it out loud, "automatic marketing." That sounded good!  Surely, I thought, someone must have thought of automatic marketing already...maybe even written on the subject. And sure enough, someone had!  I found a great book by Ben Hart and, wouldn't you know, the title was Automatic Marketing.

Since reading Hart's book, I have been on a quest to use a lot of his suggestions and those of many other writers on the subject, that we have found. Due to the fact that we have been building systems to run our company for the past 12 years, it was easy enough for us to write these Automatic Marketing techniques into our system. As I have stated many times in my book System Busters and other articles and newsletters I've written: Without a system, you will NEVER have consistent results!

By using several of our existing systems...Daily Routine Checklist, Procedures, the System100 Task System and other custom programmed systems...we are building an Automatic Marketing System for our company. By looking at our existing Daily Routine Checklist, we decided who would be the best people for the various jobs that needed to be done on our new Automatic Marketing System.

At this writing, we have implemented many marketing ideas, by putting them in a written system. Here is one example:

Customer and Prospect Information System

Your data base of customers is the most valuable tool you have for marketing your business. You need to keep it consistently cleaned/purged and updated, just like your documents in your Operations Manual (See System Busters book  for more info on Operations Manual). You could operate like most companies: once-in-awhile have someone go though and try to clean up the data base. But you know how that would go...many lost numbers, names, not to mention duplicates and other problems. Again, you need a system for updating your data base so you are not playing "Russian Roulette" with your results.

1. A checklist for inputting customer data into your data base so all your information is correct with no missing information...no gaps; Name and Address; Type of Business, Products Used, etc. We use our Estimating Checklist, our Job Entry Checklist, along with a written procedure with graphic illustrations on how to enter customer and prospect information in our data base program. 

2. A prompt on the above Checklists for updating customer data when a customer returns or reorders. Below is a partial list of Automatic Marketing Systems we have and are in process of building, using our existing and newly programmed systems:

1. Direct Mail Marketing system, or post cards and letters
2. Automatic Responders (Custom Programmed - e.g. Thank you for your order, special discounts, etc.)
3. Survey System
4. Referral System
5. Discount Coupon System
6. Request Sample System
7. Request Custom Quote System
8. Help tools for aiding customer with their problems
9. Reciprocal link system
10. Endorsement System

Maybe the above will be helpful as you develop your own Automatic Marketing System. In our next Organizer Newsletter...we may just dig a little deeper into Automatic Marketing!

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