Page 131 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

couldn’t find it anywhere online to find out the operating hours. We hadn’t seen any advertising. We finally just went, and it was very quiet. I wonder how long it will survive? You cannot sell a secret!
What can also happen is that you get busy and stop marketing. Then you get quiet and start advertising. The problem is the lag time to build leads and activity and subsequently sales in the pipeline. It’s like heating your home: it’s more expensive to shock heat and cool your home than constant heating. In the same way, it’s more cost-effective keeping up a constant rhythm of marketing. You have to carry on marketing in busy times to stop the quiet times. Quiet times with overheads are expensive.
Marketing is essential for making sales. Marketing covers many things: brand, advertising, collateral, etc. When brainstorming a friend’s start-up, he had no allowance for marketing. I saw this as failure before he had started. I re-jigged his pricing and distribution model to factor it in. The marketing cost had to sit somewhere, either in his pricing for him to do the marketing or with his dealer network. You cannot sell a secret.
Paulism: You cannot sell a secret. Marketing must be constant and you have to be there, in their face, when people make up their minds to buy, or they go elsewhere.