Today I had a discussion with a fellow entrepreneur who was wondering whether to reduce his pricing on a new business. His point was related to the fact that his very new business hadn’t achieved a great deal of sales volume just yet.
Then I asked him if he had implemented any of the sales generating activities we had discussed last week – to which the answer was no. My response was straight and simple:
If you haven’t been out knocking on doors selling your product to the potential target market, then how is it possible to know if the marketing mix is wrong?
It was at that time he knew he had some boot strapping work to do and get out there and sell.
The point for entrepreneurs is that it is easy to get tempted to constantly revisit the strategy. To go back to the plans when things are not automatically falling into place. Instead of doing the really hard stuff – we look for a simple revision of ideas, the plan and all that shiny stuff. The thing we often avoid is the hard effort of selling and facing rejection. But until we go out into the market and try to generate revenue, it’s impossible to have real market feedback of what needs revised.
So before we re-design our plans and process, we have to test the current one in market. We do this by trying to sell what we already have at every possible distribution point. Until we have done that, strategy revision is just an excuse for not putting in the effort required.
Great advice- as usual. It always makes me cringe when I hear that someone has altered their marketing plans haven’t yielded the lofty results they expected- only to find out that they either a) Didn’t actually do anything except plan, (implementation- what’s that?) or b) Bother to have a good measure in place to determine success.
Fiddling with plans without actions is just procrastination at the end of the day…. it’s not real “doing”.
At the very least get out, about and dirty, ask questions, listen. Customers are talking about you anyway, so you might as well get in on the conversation.
But the real learning comes from getting rejected- and if you think getting rejected from a client is tough- watch the first few episodes of any American Idol Series!
The key is to get rejected. Then go away think and improve. Get rejected again. Improve again. And again…And again.
Great post thank you for posting it.
I know I’ve been guilty of this exact thing at times.
As a coach of a number of young entrepreneurs I see this all the time.
Getting them to take action to discover the true potential of something is harder than anything else. Lots of people over manage and like the idea of being entrepreneurial but when it comes to the tuff that makes you one they back off.
Great post.
Q