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simply passing the invitation to the boss. They drew his/her attention to it and treated
it as if it was very special. The response rate for attending the meeting was 78 out of
100. Putting that another way, 78 busy business opinion leaders attended the
meeting, assessed the concept and bought into the idea. More importantly, they
became advocates who praised the idea to their business contacts which led to many
more unsolicited sales.

The firm with the idea to sell was a marketing consultancy, but every entrepreneur
should think through successful approaches with the intention of building their own
creativity.

Consultants are better than most . . . but they
must do better – trust me I’m a consultant!

In 1997 the Direct Mail Information Service researched thirty-eight mail-
ings from different consultants. If consultants offer anything worth
buying to their clients they ought to be able to do better than most in pro-
moting their wares. Fortunately their results were an improvement on the
0.5 per cent to 2 per cent that we have learned to expect. They scored on
average a response rate of 5.3 per cent. Of course, consultants seldom use
mailings to sell a product or service. They sell a meeting with the potential
client so you would expect a higher response rate than the norm on two
accounts:

n It is an easier sale if all that you are selling is the “no obligation”
appointment.

n Consultants should be good at doing what they teach others to do.

Advertising

Recently I read an article by a highly respected business editor who
advised that when nobody wants to buy your product or service you should
advertise heavily. I could not agree less. The demise of the more stupid dot
com ideas has been largely a direct result of trying to advertise the com-
pany’s way out of trouble when nobody wanted what they had to sell. It is,
of course the responsibility of marketing to create desire for products and
services, but advertising is not the best way to do this without far less
expensive groundwork. A virtually cost-free PR campaign followed by
advertising when the market has been “warmed up” sometimes makes
sense, but unless you know who the potential buyers for your offering are,
advertising may be a very expensive way of saying the wrong things to the
wrong people just when they have no wish to hear it.

Advertising also has the disadvantage of being plagued by what I call
the Mandy Rice-Davies syndrome. Unless their minds are previously dis-

152 Key management questions