There is a good chance you have done a lot of different things in this time frame.
Now what you are looking for are the sales and marketing activities that have worked exceptionally well in the past.
What was the single best sales or marketing promotion you tried in your business?
What was the second best, what was the third best and so on?
You then ask yourself the question 'How can I take these successful sales or marketing promotions and either reuse them exactly as they are or make minor updates or tweaks and use them again?' (In other words you take past sales or marketing successes and recycle them for use today.)
One of the big mistakes all businesses make is that we always want to invent something new.
But when you have marketing promotions that have proven to be successful in the past they will often work again and again in the future.
Example 1:
A beauty therapist discovered that the offer of a particular beauty treatment was very popular with their lady clients at Christmas as a lot of ladies wanted to look their best at this time of the year.
Well that same campaign is going to work identically well on Valentine's Day because women want to look really good then too.
So this campaign could be easily adapted for Valentine's Day.
And if it worked great at Christmas one year, there's a 90 per cent chance it's going to work just as well at Christmas the next year.
So why go and create an entirely new offer or new campaign (that may or may not work) when you already know what did work?
Example 2:
In my weekend paper I used to see a small display ad offering a free booklet on how to be more successful when betting on horse races.
The funny thing is this ad appeared for over 10 years without any changes. (The ad obviously worked for this business so they continued to recycle and use it again and again and again.)
Example 3:
Many years ago I used to present sales training seminars for a wide range of organisations. I found that when I presented these seminars many of the sales people attending told me the same thing.
"I used to use xyz sales strategy a while ago and it worked really well to make more sales. However I stopped doing xyz over a year ago. Your seminar has reminded me to start using xyz sales strategy again."
In other words a lot of the time we know what to do to boost our sales results.
And in most cases we have used a certain strategy or promotion in the past and it worked amazingly well.
The problem is that we have stopped using what worked well in the past.
Luckily this problem is very easy to fix if you just recycle the successful sales and marketing promotions and strategies that have already worked well.
If they worked well in the last 1-3 years there is an excellent change they will work well today.
"The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are." - John Burroughs
Action Exercise:
What sales or marketing promotions and strategies have you used in the past 1-3 years that worked exceptionally well?
How can you recycle and use these promotions again today?
- Graham McGregor is The Ten Minute Sales Coach™ and helps businesses that sell a service to create higher sales and delighted clients in only ten minutes a week.
Register at his website www.TenMinuteSalesSolutions.com and Graham will give you a simple strategy that you can use in ten minutes to get a number of your clients eagerly recommending your services to many of the people they know.
