Now Why Don't He Write? (Or, Where are all my leads?)

As a marketer of a product or service have you ever had that thought with respect to your prospects (or customers)?

"We have a high-quality, value-added fill in the blank. We're marketing it. Why don’t we have more business?"

There could be lots of reasons. Maybe your competitor has a better offering. Maybe you aren’t marketing in the right places (where your prospect is seeking your product). Maybe you aren’t using the right messages (we often find this to be the case). Maybe it’s a combination.

Even if your marketing efforts are working, it’s likely that you have sales goals to reach and that “someone from above” is asking you to improve performance.

So how are you going to improve marketing's performance to increase sales, improve customer retention, drive new customer acquisition (or another top-level objective).

Some thoughts:

• Scan and evaluate your competitors. In addition to considering their tactical execution, what relationship are they attempting to develop with your customers and prospects? Marketing messages and content can be as revealing as tactical selections.
• Consider your call (or calls) to action. Is it compelling from the prospect's point of view? Is it role specific? Does it promise something of value?
• Review your metrics. It's possible you aren't reviewing the right metrics. Customers may be responding but not in the way that you anticipated.
• Prospects are responding. You just don't know about it. It's an ugly truth to uncover, but a worthy one in the end: Are leads coming into to your company via a selected mechanism (phone, web, etc.) but not being properly parsed to the correct internal respondent? There may also be a disconnect between internal departments. Either way, you can't measure and improve upon what you don't know about.
• There is a serious disconnect between sales and marketing. This can be an issue of message being out of synch, lack of timing/orchestration between the two departments or something -- anything else -- that represents disparity between these two departments. Whatever the issue the result can be damaging: dissonance between sales and marketing can confuse prospects and prevent them from responding to your offer.

There are countless ways to improve the performance of your marketing program. We've offered just a few for consideration.

If the marketing strategy you've deployed in the past is not delivering the results you're expected to deliver, by all means don't replicate what you're doing! Before 2011 begins, re-visit, re-think and re-set your strategy so you can deliver improved -- and measurable -- results.