Herman School of Business
Trade Waste For Productivity...
This time last year I was certain about the avenue to travel to get more speaking engagements. I would join organizations for Meeting Professionals and the National Speakers Association and get in front of as many faces as I could. There were trips to national conventions in New York and a trip to Las Vegas. There were regional meetings in DC and Virginia and Maryland. I shook hands with hundreds of people and traded lots of business cards.
Knowing that members of these groups were responsible for setting up corporate meetings I was sure that they would love a copy of my book and my media package and that after I mailed them out the phone would be ringing off the hook. I sent out 500 packages. Count them up. 500 times ten bucks for the media kits with all those slick articles about me in national magazines. 500 times the cost of a copy of HERMANISMS. And “ouchio” 500 times the nearly five bucks it cost to mail them out Priority Mail. I will save you the math…not counting the cost of actually driving to the meetings, the dues I paid, the trips on the airplanes and the cost of attending the breakfasts and lunches…over ten thousand dollars was spent on this “can’t miss” marketing campaign.
The next gig I get from this effort will be my first one.
Needless to say…that effort wasted time and money. You see folks I have no crystal ball that shows me the way…but I do have systems in place to show me when something isn’t working. Not to say that down the road this work won’t pay dividends, but it wasn’t giving me a payoff now. As I introduced myself to people at meetings and conventions dozens of times the person I met would say… “Hey, I have your book on my desk!” Yes, I am sure there will be some residual benefit from having the material out there, but one year tells me that method is the slow boat to China so I am quitting the effort completely. The money lost didn’t kill my spirit and it was within my budget last year but it didn’t garner any results so I have cut it from this years’ budget and the time spent as well.
Fortunately I was doing more than one marketing effort last year…some that were far less expensive than the Meeting Planner effort…and some of those other efforts worked way better than I expected. You see…I keep track of what works and what doesn’t. And this month was spent transitioning from cutting out the time and money on NSA, MPI, AMPS, and any other organization…and putting it more into what did work last year…and thus far March has been the best month of my speaking/consulting/book selling efforts ever.
Do you track what you do and admit when some things are failing? Do you do what I do and trade in the failing efforts and change to put more time in the winning ways? I ask people all the time where their customers come from…where they derive their revenue…and they stare at me blankly and say “I don’t know.”
- Posted: 21 March 2009
- Comments: 0
- Category: Business success
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