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       Marketing Mistake #1: Not testing.

      It’s amazing how few companies ever test any aspect of their marketing and compare it with something else. They bet their destiny on arbitrary subjective decisions and conjecture. This is sad for a number of reasons.

      To begin with we don’t have the right or the power to predetermine what the marketplace wants and what the best price, package, or approach will be. Rather, as business owners and managers, we have the obligation and the power to put every important marketing question to a vote by the only people whose ballots count: customers and prospects.

      How do we put a marketing question to a vote? By testing one sales thrust against another; one price against another; one ad concept against another; one headline against another; one TV or radio commercial against another; one follow up or up-sell overture against another. The point is: This is not guess work. When you test one approach against another and carefully analyze and tabulate the results, you will be amazed that one approach always substantially out-pulls all the others by a tremendous margin. You’ll also be amazed at how many more sales or how much larger the average orders are that you can realize from the same effort.

      The purpose of testing is to demand maximum performance from every marketing effort. If each of your salespeople averages 15 calls a day, doesn’t it make sense to find the one sales presentation or package that lets them close twice as many sales and increases their average order by 40% to 100% with the same amount of effort?

      You can easily achieve immediate increases in sales and profits merely by testing. Tomorrow, have your salespeople try wording their presentations differently, use different hot-button focuses, different packages, different specially-priced offers, different add-ons or upgrades, different follow-up offers, et cetera. Each day review the specific performance of each test approach. Then, analyze the data.

      If a specific new twist on your basic sales approach out closes the old approach by 25-50%, doesn’t it make sense for every salesperson to start using this new approach? Test every sales variable. Any positive or negative data can help you to dramatically manipulate the effectiveness of your sales efforts. But don’t stop at merely finding those approaches, offers, prices or packages that outperform the others. Once you identify the most successful combination, your work has just begun. Now find out how high is high. Keep experimenting to come up with even better approaches that out-pull your current control data.

      Your control is the concept, approach, offer or sales presentation that has consistently proven through comparative testing to be the best performer. Until you establish your control concepts, techniques and approaches, you can’t possibly maximize your marketing. Once you find control concepts or approaches, keep testing to see if you can improve on their performances, thereby replacing one control with a better one.