Your source for new business can come from one of 3 channels: cultivating existing customers; an inbound marketing strategy; or an outbound marketing strategy. The proportion in which you mix these 3 channels will be determined by both the nature of your specific product offering, coupled with the nature of your particular target market. Finding the right mix for your business results in that reliable stream of new business which you are after.

Cultivating Existing Customers
Cultivating new business from existing customers fits with the farming analogy. That is, you currently have the right fields to raise the targeted set of crops. And you are proficient at farming: you know when and how to plant the seeds, how to nurture, and how to harvest.

But you can only farm if you have access to a sufficient amount of arable land, which represents existing customers in this analogy. Existing customer are those who meet the real definition of customers; i.e. a consummated relationship in which they have bought something from you before.

The fact that they have bought from you before, means that they have experienced your product offering. There can be no substitute for this. Having bought something from you means that they know you better than those who they have not bought anything from. Conversely, it also means that you know them better than any new prospective customer.

And this is what removes the randomness of communications. It is the most fluid of relationships. An existing customer is more likely to pay attention and listen to what you have to say, more than any newcomer. They associate value with you and their past experience, and this brings with it a certain amount of earned credibility. It’s real brand equity.

Inbound Marketing Strategy
An inbound marketing strategy is one which you seek to attract new business to come to you. It is the fishing analogy. That is, you must know where the good fishing spots are, when the best times to fish are, and the type of bait that will get the fish to bite.

And if you can get all of that right, you still need some actual skill once you get them on the hook. There is more than one fish story where the fish broke the line, or jumped out the net. So you need the right combination of skill and patience to reel them in.

Translating this to marketing terms, it means you need to be putting out marketing messages that will attract potential customers. More specifically, you are putting out messages that define the problem you are solving, and why it is important to solve. And you present yourself as a bountiful source of knowledge and information on the subject. New customers are drawn to the information that you are offering up, because they self-identify with the situation.

An inbound strategy is effective when your product offering is addressing a problem that is on the minds of potential customers. If the problem is commanding a certain amount of attention in the mind of your prospective customer already, there will be a natural affinity to the messaging that you are putting out there. Reeling them in from that starting point, requires effective content to further persuade them to come in closer.

Outbound Marketing Strategy
An outbound marketing strategy is one in which you target and seek out the customer. This is the hunting analogy. Similar to the fishing analogy, you must know where your prey is to be found. But unlike fishing, they are not underwater and are clearly visible to you, and they are there for the taking.

To be effective, you need to be skilled at using your weapon of choice. If your skill is not good enough, you miss the shot and the prey gets away. If your choice of weapon is not good enough, you may hit the prey, but it may still get away licking its wounds.

Translating this to marketing terms, it means that you go directly after the prospective customer that fits the profile. You have a deep understanding of the problem you are solving, as well as the set of customer profiles that can justify and benefit from acquiring your solutions. So your qualification of the prospective customer can occur quite efficiently.

Your main challenge here is the ability to get that necessary attention from a customer who is happy with the status quo. You marketing and sales efforts must be very well targeted. Otherwise as they say, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”.

Ultimately, the mix of strategies that you blend into your new customer acquisition model depends on your business. It will be driven by the receptivity of your target market to the various channels, and the suitability of your product offering to the various channels. Recognize that your choices will be driven by strategies that are effective at bringing in new business, while maintaining a reasonable cost of customer acquisition. Otherwise you will starve or go broke.

Just in case you had any doubts about the effectiveness of digital marketing, a recent story in The National Post may help you think otherwise. The story is about a business who recruited US distributors to sell silicon germanium (SiGe) semiconductors, which were to be fabricated in China.

The whole business was a complete sham. But the fact that they were able to execute so well in securing $13m in advance deposits over a 4 year period, really makes you ask: How could they have possibly been able to succeed?

Did the company gain the trust of an existing customer base through successful previous business dealings? And then decide to dupe them through the bogus Chinese SiGe. That of course is the popular playbook for investment management fraud.

But that is not the case here. There was no previous business relationship which they took advantage of and manipulated. These business partners were not known to them at all. The key to their success was in fact, you guessed it, digital marketing.

Now you may say that this is just spam. But this does not fall into your typical consumer spam categories. You know the ones: guaranteed weight loss programs; knock-off Rolexes; knock-off Viagra; schemes to increase the size of certain body parts; Russian brides. No, this is high tech. This is a hard sell. Anyone buying technology products is very discerning about the product or service that they are buying. These are the guys who won’t be duped. Yet they were.

Ok. So here is how it breaks down. These are the actual steps that they followed:

1. They hired a web-design specialist.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to look at their website. The whole thing was shut down in 2013 and the culprit accepted his plea bargain and is going to jail. But, this must have been quite a persuasive web site. Full of great marketing content and images. And to some extent, the whole value proposition for the SiGe wafers must have been established.

2. They purchased mail lists.
Now these were not random mail lists. They were from Vietnam. So what kind of mail list from Vietnam has names of individuals who may potentially buy-in to an opportunity to import SiGe from China. Well, quite likely, it is a list of individuals who were interested in these types of opportunities; i.e. importing technological components into the US. So this was a targeted list.

3.They created an email marketing campaign.
You know the aggregate statistics on open rates for unsolicited email are really low. Besides staying out of the spam filter, the only way to improve open rates is to have a subject heading that resonates with the recipient. And then there must have actually been content in the body of those emails, that got the recipient to respond to the call-to-action.

4.Follow-up.
They smoothly transitioned from the marketing cycle to the sales cycle. Somehow they were able to provide sufficient proof in order to get real commitments from their prospects: i.e. advance cash deposits.

Now obviously this was a scam. And they indeed provided all the necessary falsehoods in order to move their prospects to a close. But their marketing methodology seems to be have been quite sound. They were able to come in as an unknown company, offer a value proposition to a discerning target customer, execute a targeted digital marketing campaign, and accomplish their objective of signing up distributors, and obtaining sizable up-front deposits. It certainly should make you think: are you getting the most out of your own marketing strategy?

For those of you who are hockey fans and enjoy watching Don Cherry on Coach’s Corner, it is always interesting to hear the perspective that Grapes brings to a situation. Highly entertaining at times, but often, it is wisdom that is rooted in a lifetime of experience.

One of the stats that always rings loud is that “It is not the number of shots that matters. It is the number of quality scoring chances that matter.”

I love the phrase. It harkens back to the early days of the web when it was all about counting the number of eyeballs that viewed your website. The implication was that some proportion of those visitors would flow through and become customers. But, as the dot-com crash infamously demonstrated, eyeballs do not have a direct correlation to the acquisition and growth of customers.

In marketing and sales, it is no different than hockey, it is the quality scoring chances that matter. This is the statistic that matters the most. Yet when the sales results for a company are not materializing, there is often a parade of numbers from everyone in the mix. All of those whose primary activity it is to contribute to achieving more sales, want to step up.

The talk is all about the number.

The number of flyers distributed. The number of emails sent. The number of phone calls made. The number of customer visits made. The number of demos performed. When the pressure is on, it is all about the number. Everyone wants to be driving up their number, with the “hope” that it will all translate into more business.

But as one of my earliest bosses said to me, “hope” is not a word that works in sales and marketing. It is not a verb we can use. Hope does not advance the sales process. And hope does not close orders. So you better stop hoping right now.

The number that matters most, and gives us the best reason to believe that it will translate to more sales, is the number of “quality” opportunities. And from a business perspective, the question to ask is what makes up that “quality” opportunity? What are the parameters to measure? What are the sequence of activities that will cascade together to arrive at a “quality” opportunity? It is these parameters that will make up a meaningful data set that can be analyzed and used to shore up weaknesses in the process.

Now here is the tough part.

It likely will not be apparent what sequence of activities, or what combination of channels will be the ones that work for you. At the beginning of addressing your market, it makes sense to have some level of activity with several different marketing and sales tactics. But the key is to seek out and monitor the customer journey, and whether your efforts are impacting decisions made along that journey. If they are not, you will not arrive at quality opportunities; i.e. the ones that are closeable.

And even if by some stroke of luck, you set up an effective channel right from the start, there is an undertow. Customer behavior just doesn’t stay the same. You need to keep an eye on it. If things stop producing the level of results that are expected, just increasing numbers will not result in your customers changing their habits in your direction.

Finding the right parameters is the start of building your marketing and sales processes. Tracking them and evolving them is what will enable you to better predict and direct your business.

Guglielmo Marconi is a name that is synonymous with radio. And while it is true that he was granted the first patent in the UK in 1896 for wireless telegraphy, his ability to secure his place in history as the inventor of radio had a lot more to do with a different set of skills. His recognition as the father of radio had a lot more to do with his promotional abilities, the markets he nurtured, and the strategic partnerships he created, than it had to do with his inventive abilities.

When it comes down to the technological breakthrough, Marconi had introduced the spark-gap transmitter for the purpose of wireless telegraphy. A technology that puts out broadband pulse of energy, with quite an inefficiency. Early wireless telegraph operators had to have headsets that acted like a vice on their heads with ear pieces jammed tight, in order to make out the faint sounds of those weak signals. And this technique itself, relied on the use of an induction coil, invented by Tesla. (But that is a story for another time).

Radio as we know it today – the transmission of voice – was really invented and driven by the Canadian, Reginald Fessenden. But I bet even the contestants on Jeopardy would never know it.

In 1900, Fessenden combined a spark-gap transmitter with a 10 kHz interrupter, in order to generate a continuous AC signal which could have its amplitude modulated by way of a carbon microphone which he put in series. It worked. From his initial breakthrough, he realized that he needed a better source for the continuous AC so he commissioned Westinghouse to build a 100 kHz source. And so was borne the Alexanderson alternator. In 1906, Fessenden made his first voice broadcast which was received by a number of ships at sea. Quite a breakthrough.

So, would you rather talk, or dit dit dit dah dah dit dit… ?

As it turns out, effective promotion had a lot to do with whose name is remembered today. Marconi intuitively knew something about getting people’s attention and interest. One of his great successes was transmitting the race results for yachting competitions to New York City through the early 1900s. It certainly got him noticed and associated with wireless. And breaking major news such as the sinking of the Titanic, associated Marconi strongly as the source of the medium. And although Fessenden’s work drove the development of the Alexanderson alternator, Marconi was quick to adopt it to upgrade his wireless telegraph network.

Fessenden, on the other hand, did not find an effective way to promote his breakthrough in voice communication. And the general marketplace did not see the value. Even though he had on the order of 300 patents, his investors’ myopic vision resulted in the patents being sold to Westinghouse. And so Fessenden’s name is lost in the annals of the patent office and scientific journals of the time. What a shame.

Getting people to listen to your message in one form or another is a big deal. Letting the product speak for itself doesn’t do the trick. Building a following is what is needed. Whether each follower buys the product or not, is just as important as them buying into your message. With each follower you gain, your message gets amplified. And as history has shown, your ability to out maneuver your competition is more than just enhanced, if you are able to hold on to your followers.

Quite a ludicrous strategy.

Yes, I expect that perhaps you have heard stories of individuals who have gone this route. But it really turns life into a meager existence. Saving your way to prosperity can easily translate to starving yourself into prosperity. That measn going without. And going without does not turn you into a strong and healthy being, able to endure the struggles that are thrown your way.

Yes, defence wins games. It preserves your position. It protects your lead. It prevents the competition from taking advantage of you. And when you are under attack, defence saves the day. But you still need to put points on the board to get ahead of the other guys. And at times, offence even turns out to be the best defence.

Business is not about stagnating with the status quo. It is about growing and evolving with the needs of your customers and marketplace. And the nature and quality of your customer engagement efforts plays a pivotal role. It’s about keeping the direct lines of communication flowing. Putting out your marketing messages, your marketing content and seizing opportunities for direct dialogue with prospective customers.

In times of uncertainty, times of slow moving economies, or times of changing economies, there is a force that naturally pushes you into a defensive mindset. But you must remind yourself that the uncertainties do not automatically translate themselves into a period of attack.

In fact, it is exactly this pervasive defensive mindset that can create opportunities that would not ordinarily be there. Many established companies, especially large ones with a lot of moving parts, will be quicker to slow down or lock down. The financial exposure from just one large project, or the aggregated exposure from multiple projects, may just be too risky. And the company may have to hibernate while uncertainty levels are high.

And while the rest of the world is in slow motion, companies that are continually and actively maintaining a market dialogue, can better determine where to invest their efforts.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

The dotcom crash that started in March 2000, gave way to an economic slowdown and recession that lasted through to the first quarter of 2003. Smack in the middle of that major downturn, on October 23, 2001, Apple introduced the iPod. The rest is history. It has completely transformed the company. I still remember Bill Gates being quoted, and saying it in a most astonishing manner: “… And the record labels agreed to that?”, when commenting on the iTunes offer of $1 per song.

And a more recent one.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis started at the end of 2007 and triggered both a financial crisis and The Great Recession which finally broke in June 2009. An 18 month recession, triggered by real estate lending, had spread globally. And again, smack in the middle of it, in 2008, Lauren Rottet quits her firm to start her own international architecture and design company, Rottet Studios. Her colleagues thought she was crazy. Within 4 years, her firm had offices in in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Shanghai, and had done several iconic hotels.

How did she do it?

Minimized all expenses except for marketing and PR. Could she have succeed as quickly in a normal economy? Maybe not. Her established competitors would more likely have stepped in to prevent her growth.

Your demand generation system, and your sales force, must keep you in dialogue with your market. In slower economic times, both prospective customers and existing customers may be harder to reach. But that is exactly the time when your engagement strategies have to be at their best. Whether there is a turning point in the market, or whether the market is really changing, having effective market communication strategies is what will keep you in the game.