This article stems from a current national discussion and I believe this discussion is culturally and economically crucial. In fact, I encourage you to discuss this topic with your colleagues and get to the heart of the matter for your business.

We’re shifting our own “social media marketing” over to real professional networking on LinkedIn and within our chosen organizations. And by the way, email marketing still rocks!

We’re leaving the noisy social chatter and joining the focused, productive discussions both online and in real meetings. Care to join the movement?

Facebook Folly

Consider this analogy. Let’s say you commit a significant budget for radio advertising. Would you pay a radio group that only played your ads if they felt like it, or only according to a secret broadcast schedule, and then refused to give you independently verified data about audience reach, demographics and ratings stats? Welcome to Facebook! They’ll gladly take your money and then quite possibly hassle you about your ad content. If they let you run the campaign, they generate analytics reports that show “engagements” which are also called “vanity metrics” for a good reason. You might even hear from a tire kicker or two, perhaps a couple of trolls… and gain little or no new business.

This is the typical experience that I and numerous B2B colleagues have had advertising on Facebook.

Targeted demographics or advertising sales scam?

The top social media company says they know who your customers are (or would be) because they have the data, and they have it in spades, but not on everyone.

Supposedly, they pinpoint and distribute your ads to the right people; whatever they say their algorithm does, not what an independent auditor can analyze and measure, and you have no possible way of confirming or validating the analytics they provide. It’s whatever they say it is, not what you actually experience in results. I find it amazing that advertisers still widely accept this dubious scheme.

Where it Works

Social media does work for certain kinds of businesses, namely socially-driven businesses such as design, retail, fashion, beauty, health & fitness, coaching and lifestyle brands. That makes perfect sense.

What if you’re none of the above and sell things like heavy equipment, engineering services, contract manufacturing, commercial construction, IT services, application software and other B2B products & services? In these industries, Facebook is a time drain in a creepy crapshoot.

On the other hand, LinkedIn will connect you with dedicated career people in your chosen fields. The free LinkedIn personal profile provides the best functionality and user experience of any “social media” platform, and all in a business-driven environment!

Look at Reality!

• Will a clever Facebook ad resonate like a conversation between an engineer and their client CEO?
• Would a manufacturing company CEO be more likely to click an ad and request an appointment on Facebook or return a subject-relevant email from a potential supplier of critical components?
• What carries more weight, a pertinent direct message from a LinkedIn Connection or a message notification from a salesperson on your company Facebook page?
• How about a Facebook ad versus a product demo invitation from a company referred to you by someone in your network?
• How about seeing a mask-clad visitor dropping off a colorful brochure with large photos and bullet points that speak to your need? Compare that to the slight chance you will see a boosted Facebook video from that company sandwiched between an insane political meme complete with rant and your buddy’s latest vacation bragging.

B2B decision makers respond to messages that directly speak to their needs and they don’t use Facebook to look for those solutions! If you’re the odd CEO or Operations Manager who goes to Facebook to find crucial information to run your business, my advice is don’t be too distracted by the ugliness, and good luck finding any solutions that meet your needs.

Marketing Efforts Better Prioritized

When it comes to your B2B social media strategy, I offer this soothing advice. Relax!

The real social media value for most B2B marketing is having another nice looking brand presence online. That takes only minimal effort while it maintains some additional brand visibility.

If you’ve been struggling to make social media work for your company, pause and reconsider your entire marketing mix. Place social media where it belongs – as an ancillary extension of your primary online presence. Your website is far and away your higher priority!

Go Direct!

Yes, of course you can use technology to reach more customers! PPC search marketing delivers validated and proven results, especially when your landing pages resonate with effective calls to action.

So first off, channel more creative energy into the only place on the internet over which you have total control – your website! Work hard on those campaign landing pages!

And remember, direct marketing and personal selling have always worked and still work wonders for small business.

If we’re not already connected on LinkedIn, please feel free to reach out and connect with me: linkedin.com/in/chucksink.  Perhaps my network can help you and your network.

The post Why Your B2B Social Media Fails to Produce appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

There are two ways to obtain new business. It finds you (branding, marketing, reputation & referrals) or you find it (your salesforce). When both ways work in tandem, new business fires on all cylinders but sometimes the outside selling effort needs more throttle.

Maintaining a stellar reputation through hard work and strategic marketing is a universal business ideal. Sometimes, however, it takes more than strong brand awareness to grow. It takes active messengers in the field striking up meaningful conversations outside of normal business discourse.

Why, in so many companies, is the CEO the highest sales producer even when they have a professional sales team? I believe there are 3 reasons:

• CEOs make authoritative decisions on the spot and make things happen faster.
• Buyers perceive the CEO to have the highest stakes and will have a customer advocate at the very top.
• The CEO is CEO for a reason. He or She knows what it takes to grow a business! CEOs see things from a high level and can often spot opportunities where most salespeople wouldn’t bother looking.

An Empowered Salesperson Shares Authority and Vision

When I was a salesperson, in a few firms I was blessed to have enough authority to engage company resources and had a little bit of creative vision. In hindsight, I was terrible at conventional sales practices and had little discipline in performing them. Despite that problem, I thought outside the box enough to find and score big clients like Keurig Green Mountain, Bigelow Tea, Nuance Dragon and Ansys Fluent back in my sales days working for “the man.” In each case I either made a random phone call from a hunch or pulled up to the front entrance of a shiny building and walked in inquiring.

By contrast, the last firm I worked for kept me in a tight box chained to a CRM, not to help me sell but to grow their database. I could offer the client no added value. Meanwhile, I was headed straight for the poor house and as a result, was driven to part company and start my own business even though broke at the time.

Cleared for Takeoff

When I became a CEO, developing new business became as natural as getting dressed and my sales once again skyrocketed. Now I know why. Not only do I make the decisions but I engage clients in a way that brings them real value rather than just facilitating transactions that other people must implement. Therein lies the key to leveling up your sales team’s success.

Today’s salesperson needs to be integral to the delivery of product solutions and customer service. Clients want someone who can do something for them, not simply echo their questions or concerns to a VP or manager. They want more than an advocate. They want a working associate, a partner. You want that too which proves the point.

How to Next Level Your Sales

Be sure to support your salespeople by maintaining company awareness and lead generation marketing. Now, figure out a way for your salespeople to create and bring real value to their customers – your customers. Enable them to go farther and wider for the customer than convention would suggest. Finally, get creative and get your salespeople to engage with value, instead of “good synergy” messages. Just a few of many examples:

• Make direct calls to CEOs instead of end users and their managers. Ask intelligent, open-ended questions and listen like your life and their life depends on it.
• Look around the office, shop or home for brands your company could supply and call those companies.
• Join a trade association or regional economic development organization and leverage your new member honeymoon status on the executive committees.
• Write authoritative business and industry articles and get them published. Leverage them as third party-validated collateral.
• If you’re a salesperson, publish your own business newsletter, blog or vlog independent of your company’s marketing support (or lack of it).
• Set up a weekly Zoom networking or mastermind group with an offline follow up component. Build meaningful relationships.
• Go door-to-door canvassing in a hazmat suit.
• Your idea here…

These are just a few ideas, most of which I’ve implemented with ongoing success. Now please trust me on this. If I can do it, anyone can!

The post The Sales Highway to Greener Business Pastures appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

You have the choice to trust your God-given light and remain true to it or let cultural and societal winds blow your business practices around in their chaotic and whimsical directions.

Jeffrey Immelt or Elon Musk?

Think about the completely different leadership styles of Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO who stepped down from the floundering behemoth General Electric, and Elon Musk, the ever-optimistic dreamer who never runs out of blue-sky opportunities. Mr. Immelt ran GE according to conventional power models, i.e., cozy up to establishment power. While he has his share of shortcomings, Mr. Musk has his vision and sticks to it no matter what and hasn’t looked back. His firms are literally skyrocketing regardless of his many critics and conventional wisdom!

What does your brand stand for? Is your brand strategy foundational and integral or is it temporary and easily manipulated? Will your brand promise and core message be firm and familiar or soft and unrecognizable after the next wave of political, cultural and economic disruption?

Run your own business!

I’m seeing recently thriving businesses die unnecessarily of fear and dependency. I’ve witnessed great local brands let politically charged narratives kill them because the owners focused their attention on daily media reports instead of their customers. I’ve seen other businesses in the same industry and market thriving and growing at the same time as they say, “we’re not going anywhere. Watch this!”

Is your brand on solid ground? Do you need to pour some concrete and drive in some pilings so it has a foundation you can stand on no matter what comes along next?

What do you stand for anyway?

The post Refresh Your Brand Promise Commitment Now appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Learn a valuable sales lesson during the pandemic outbreak. Get to know every client or customer on a personal level. It’s amazing what opportunities you may find for new business. And there’s the rub. “New business” is not synonymous with “new customer.” I was taught this by business owners pretty early in my selling career but I’ll admit not learning it very well until I became a business owner.

“Some Web Guy”

A couple of our clients paused services or cut marketing costs at the early stage of the business shutdown. Thankfully, some new projects have rolled in and business has remained steady thanks primarily to current clients expanding their needs. In particular, I got to know one of them for the first time on a personal level, Chief to Chief.

As if by accident, this longtime client, after years of delegating his firm’s marketing to a manager, found out what we really do. In his mind “Chuck Sink Link” was a cost of doing business – just “some web guy” or “someone who hosts our website.” This client (the CEO, not the manager point-of-contact) got on the phone with me after a potential dispute and suddenly the relationship has taken off, and so has new business for both of us!

We finally know each other, and much better!

The client mentioned is a leading netting manufacturer in Connecticut who almost had to furlough many of his employees indefinitely because of a tremendous impact on two of their top markets – Amusements and Construction. He and his engineers turned on a dime to start producing protective masks while netting work is slow. Their employees, already skilled in various stitching techniques, made tens of thousands of critically needed masks.

Through our very first live conversation, the client discovered that we do scalable eCommerce websites, digital advertising and social media marketing. He then treated us like a business partner instead of “the web guy” and we’ve since built an eCommerce website together that generated about $50,000 in mask sales the first two days, resulting in hundreds of donated masks to organizations in need like homeless shelters, hospitals, first responders and nursing homes. The valued employees are at work, earning paychecks and their netting business is again having an upsurge in sales.

The Deeper Conversations

I’ve had deep discussions with several other clients during this apparent “reset” in the economy and our mutual support has been fortified. Together we are keeping busier than ever while being deeply concerned about the companies we know of that need to make difficult decisions. The wisdom and compassion we have shared with each other are among the intangible values I can’t put a price on and wouldn’t do without.

Hopefully, we’ll remember the really important aspects of work relationships as so many of us are forced physically apart for a while longer. It’s a great time for discovering who your suppliers and customers really are and how you can help make each other better at what you both do.

The post When is it okay to get personal in business? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Client – Pucuda Leading Edge

Whatever your business sector, the current pandemic slowdown is affecting you profoundly. It might be good for your company or it might be devastating but one thing is certain; you are feeling massive change underfoot and you know you must adapt.

I’m seeing some small businesses focus their energy on “cutting loss” and applying for government assistance or SBA disaster loans while some are converting their factories to make much-needed PPE for the public. Others are nurturing their key relationships and rebuilding their internal business infrastructures.

Rebuild Your Marketing Infrastructure

My clients are amazing. Most of them are stepping up their communication efforts right now, some of them big time! They have the foresight to position their businesses to be of indispensable service in their own communities immediately, and also to lead their industries during the inevitable recovery.

Image – catholicmedicalcenter.org

For example, a safety netting manufacturer in CT converted part of their factory floor to a mask production facility to make masks available for the public. Another client, a construction firm, was the first to answer the call from NH hospitals to his industry for N95 masks, donating his company’s entire stock of 200 masks to the medical team at Catholic Medical Center. This same client is working tirelessly right now on branding, marketing, PR, helping to write trade policy, and nurturing relationships with vendors, contractors, clients and business partners.

I have several other inspiring client stories but this post could get too lengthy. It’s likely that I’ll write about them in the near future.

What’s Happening Here at Home

Personally, I’ve never been busier in my life! But even though the current work is urgent and a bit stressful, I’m still using this passing crisis to reposition my business as the premium design and digital communication firm in our market with the resources and capability to scale! We’re currently in the process of building out my website’s service offerings and improving both the user experience (UX) and SEO. I even upgraded my website maintenance plan so my developer will make changes and improvements for me on-demand. This carpenter is building his house!

Most agree. Few actually do.

Client – SkiClinics.com

Remember that the best time to blow your horn is when the hall is quiet or your competition is distracted. Hmm… Here’s a thought:  People ordered to stay home or work from home are on their computers a lot. Guess where digital marketing reaches them?

Well, a past client got this message from one of my recent LinkedIn posts and decided it was time to promote his new online offerings in a big way, leading to an exciting new online marketing campaign. Check out the introductory newsletter. We’re helping to sell books and training sessions online. This new project has my juices flowing for a return to the good life we know is on the comeback!

The post That Marketing Thing – It’s now or never! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

When I was a young, aggressive salesman, I worked my tail off to get new business and produced enough to be valued. I cold called like crazy, set appointments and made presentations day after day. It was a constant struggle, though, to sustain business growth as it ebbed and flowed in spite of continuous and mighty selling efforts.

Meet Richard

There was one senior guy on the team named Richard who had all the giant accounts and he just sat there on the phone discussing business and taking big, fat orders. Either that or he would meet with his clients at the plant and entertain them as they kept an eye on their work. I suspect they also enjoyed Richard’s company and getting out of their own office for vendor meetings with a trusted, high-quality supplier.

His cup runneth over!

The real kicker about Richard was this. In spite of his already abundant sales success, most of the new business inquiries calling in would ask for Richard, and it drove me nuts! He never cold called and he never had to bang the phone for appointments like the rest of us. The biggest and most profitable business just flowed to Richard.

I liked Richard and we became fast friends but I also envied his ability to take in lucrative business without seeming to compete for it. What did he have that the rest of us didn’t?

Over the course of time and even a few career moves, it finally became clear why Richard excelled. He understood quality and he never cut corners. While I was trying to figure out ways to lower costs or match competitive price quotes just to win an order, Richard was increasing the prices his clients would pay while at the same time adding value to the total package.

No Surprises!

The primary value that Richard added was quality-assurance. Richard’s clients knew that if they worked with him, they would get the best quality products available. No shortcuts, no surprises; just predictable high quality at a fair, negotiated price.

Meanwhile, the corners I cut in quality specs to compete on price were making some customers question the value they could expect from me in the future. It took me far too long to realize that not everyone wants more for less. I assumed price meant everything and I was trying to appease prospects I assumed were cheapskates.

Give back… to your competition!

True, there are plenty of cheapskates out there but in reality, there are lots of good people in the business world who understand what things cost. “You get what you pay for.” Those were Richard’s people! They knew that Richard understood the vital nature of high quality in manufacturing. When other people like them heard of Richard’s business approach and they needed our products, they called Richard, who else? And when Richard sensed cheapness or price challenges from a new business prospect, he would cheerfully (and wisely) refer them to competing manufacturers whom he knew would cut profits just to keep their machines running.

Be the person you would call!

The lesson here is that if you’re looking for more qualified sales leads, maybe you need to focus less on sales promotions and more on delivering premium quality to all your customers every single time you do business. Quality reputations can only be earned. If you’ve earned yours, go ahead and promote it!

Promote the one thing that separates your quality from the rest. Promote it everywhere you can.  If a prospect happens to see your company promotion and call you after also getting a referral, the sale is yours! And that was Richard’s secret to easygoing sales success. He promoted quality assurance and all his customers backed him up.

Make best-in-class quality your goal. Communicate what that really costs and clearly demonstrate its value. Then deliver the best quality consistently to build your reputation. Your marketing and sales efforts will work better as the quality seekers in your market find from you the really good stuff they’re looking for.

So first ask, is your stuff really that good?

The post Quality Sales Promotion appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Loyal employee engagement shores up company strength more than perhaps any other factor. That’s why it’s constantly on every responsible executive’s mind. Your team must execute your business operations with a purpose or your product and service quality will quickly slide downhill. Following the slide, morale sinks and you’ve got deeper problems.

We all need people to show up each day with an eager willingness to collaborate, do their part and be mutually rewarded by our companies’ success.

You can read a lot about employee engagement in comprehensive HR literature as well as top strategic business books. There’s another kind of human engagement that’s almost as vital to your business as that of your key employees. How are your relationships with suppliers and contractors? How’s your supplier engagement going?

“You didn’t build that!” (LOL)

If your company is like most, you probably don’t manufacture every product component or implement every service you deliver to your clients. At a minimum, you probably rely on parts suppliers or subcontractors, whatever your company does. What if suddenly, a couple of them decided they didn’t really care about your business, maybe ran into some issues and ceased to serve your “account.” What if that’s all you and your team were thought of by critical suppliers, an “account?”

The people who run the businesses you partner with need to be solidly grounded and totally dedicated to their clients’ needs. Simply stated, their people need to care about your people. And your independent contractors need to follow your directions as if you’re the boss. You need strong, trusted relationships with your “vendors.” I try to refer to each of my suppliers as a “business partner” or else simply by their name, and my clients get to know me on a personal level as we work together.

We’re (independently) in this together!

Who can say their business runs smoothly every single day? We all know the answer! Whenever my company has run into production or communication problems, every one of my reliable “business partners” has jumped in with both feet through the thick of the issue until it was solved. I’m extremely grateful for my contractor relationships. If you happen to be one of the men and women contributing your talents to our premium marketing services, thank you!

When you are experiencing challenges together with your solution partners, and you sense real dedication and mutual trust among yourselves, that’s engagement!

Call it vendor engagement, supplier engagement or business partner engagement, it’s priceless, just like earning and keeping the quality work of your best employees. Always remember to nurture your relationships for better engagement – both inside and outside your company.

The post Your Other Team appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The marketing cycle for most businesses is far more manageable than the overall economic conditions in the country but it is extremely hard to get a handle on, and this is because, well, we’re all human. We tend to concentrate our time and effort on either the most urgent situations or else what we feel like doing; what seems the easiest route to ‘get it done’ in the moment or for the day.

Unpacking the Marketing Cycle

The marketing cycle looks like this:

Business is great. New customers are responding to an effective and sustained marketing campaign. The sales team has been “crushing it” from several months of highly motivated prospecting and lead generation, meetings and closed deals. Business is so good in fact that it’s all hands on deck to service customers and snuff out the fires from so much growth and not quite enough hands to go around. Everyone is busy and cash is flowing.

At this point, management decides it’s better to back off on the marketing campaign a while to better manage growth. This is human nature and seems logical. It’s also the exact moment at which the inevitable ebb in sales that’s so predictable in the marketing cycle begins. But we always fail to grasp it at the time! I’m speaking from my own experience and I’ve witnessed it working in several companies over many years.

When business is great, you focus everything toward serving your current customers, even your marketing messages focus on current users, because it’s the natural thing to do. It’s as if we have “built-in forgetters” concerning new business development when customers and their cash are flowing in volume. And so, the wider market ceases to hear from you and your brand fades from awareness.

At first, you notice that business volume is steady rather than rising. Then you might lose a customer or two through attrition of some kind, maybe to a competitor, and you suddenly realize you and your team have more time on your hands and margins are thinner. Uh oh, Time to fire up the forgotten marketing and selling machines again, with increased urgency and limited funds. And so it goes…

End the Cycle of Sales Urgency (and Stress)!

A few things can be done to minimize the stresses caused by drops in sales that occur as a result of being a victim to the marketing cycle.

• First thing is your product and service quality. You must fulfill your promises or your brand will lose precious market trust. Referrals are precious and result from real quality.
• Second, you need to resist the temptation to focus on operations and production at the expense of keeping marketing campaigns funded and managed. You also need to direct your sales force to keep hunting when business is great, trusting customer service to others in the company.
• Third, if business is good, invest in a new employee or subcontract the support that can dedicate their efforts specifically to the growth side of your business, and don’t back off when business is booming, for a change! You will need all the brand awareness you can get next recession. If sales slow down and revenues decline, keep the marketing and sales effort at full pitch, for a change. Find less critical areas in the business to cut costs, for a change.

Implement these three strategies and see what happens to your revenue curve over the next 2 or 3 years.

Rather than rearranging the deck chairs every time you get really busy, try adding another chair to increase and sustain your crucial marketing activities, for a change!

Applying discipline to managing the marketing cycle in this manner will have the happy effect of keeping business and cash flow strong enough to avoid the anxieties of economic hardship during those inevitable slow periods. You’ll have the assurance that market share and top-of-mind awareness are always in your favor.

The post Stop Riding The Marketing Cycle! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Does your company sell mostly to individual consumers? If so, your customer targeting can get complicated and may require a high degree of personalization. Consumers’ tastes and preferences in features/benefits run in multitudinous different directions and with choices at their fingertips, you need to build customer personas and tailor multiple sets of messages to different groups or individuals today. That is if you want your brand to stand out and lead your consumer category.

Does your business sell mostly to other businesses? Then your target audience is easily defined! You sell to the CEO or the business owner, often the same person. Simple. And how nice that is for helping you determine your branding and positioning strategy!

This approach is fundamental to having an authentic and effective brand in the business products & services (B2B) world. But some salespeople and even some business owners argue that end users of equipment, software or services highly influence decisions and must be sold first. Engineers, specifiers and purchasing managers are the ones who do all the “shopping” and make the final recommendation and therefore, can seal the decision – or so you may think.

The target of ALL B2B marketing is the CEO.

CEOs and senior executives have a unique mindset and language. CEO’s don’t think like everyday consumers when making business buying decisions. They wear a very different hat for that. Business buying decisions are just as emotion-based if not more so, but for very different reasons.

Think of the business meetings you’ve had with CEOs present. They cut through the minutia and get to the key points fast (even when being patient with others out of courtesy). They are starved for new information that can guide their decisions.

Consider what a respected millennial digital marketer, Miranda Casey, has to say. “Working in the tech industry and targeting CEOs, I’ve come to understand the importance of getting to the point fast and ‘proving the why’ as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s not every day that a company decides to make a thousand or million dollar decision…”

Additionally, the CEO may have his or her own personal motives for choosing a supplier for their business, and nobody can know exactly who else the CEO knows or what else could motivate their decisions. Remember that “blood runs thicker than water” and relationships make a difference, sometimes all the difference — all things being equal, or even not so much. The lesson here is to take the time (and be patient) to build relationships with the CEOs in your target market.

Talking with End Users only FEELS like sales work.

Seasoned B2B salespeople know that top-down selling works much better than the bottom-up approach. Business owners and executive leaders are constantly on the lookout for the best suppliers and partners to help improve their companies and gain competitive advantages. Sure, they are loyal to proven providers but keep an eye on the consistency of quality and value received. If it’s clearly demonstrated to the CEO that replacing a supplier can solve real problems and increase profitability, the old one gets the boot and the new supplier celebrates a business win

Marketing:  Your Intangible B2B Sales Force 

The same principle applies in B2B marketing. Position your brand only for the CEOs in the industries you serve. Don’t try pushing your list of features. That’s a consumer-based commodity approach! Explain, rather, the actual and differentiated results your solutions provide clients, maybe even their competition.

As your messages get through to your CEO targets with the ringtone of relevance, your brand will begin to develop a subtle (even if at first subconscious) mental interest. Then a natural value-focused curiosity will make learning more about your product/service part of their to-do list.

With a continued consistency of strong messages, your pricing and business model will be investigated or directly inquired of – your opportunity to close new business.

Demonstrate category leadership to your target company CEOs and they will wonder if they should be doing business with you.

The post CEOs and Consumers Decide Differently appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

What if these same entrepreneurs continued to ramp up sales work, implemented whatever marketing programs they could afford and then applied patience? Would more time and incremental growth render their quest for venture capital obsolete, giving them greater command of fulfilling their business vision? Experience tells us yes.

I believe financial expert Dave Ramsey who says “cash is king and debt is dumb.” Of course, there are exceptions to such truisms and I’ve used credit card debt in the past to successfully leverage my way out of near-bankruptcy, but I believe I was blessed along the way. I paid off the cards as fast as possible and one day I was able to wipe out that debt completely. That very day, my cash flow and profits began to improve dramatically! Since then I’ve accrued some working capital to keep business humming and growing, thank God!

Goal Achievement through Strategic Patience

Mine is a micro-example of many healthy companies that have chosen organic growth over partnered or capitalized expansion. Many of my clients and associate firms have been doing very well without implementing fully integrated and comprehensive marketing campaigns, which can be rather expensive. Instead, we execute affordable, strategic and incremental marketing steps that, over time, provide the building blocks for more comprehensive marketing programs with the firepower to significantly increase sales and grow our businesses all the more.

I want to do more with my website! I want to increase the frequency and value of my newsletter. I want to spend more strategic time on LinkedIn. I want to produce a new brochure and direct mail piece. I want to attend more networking events. I want to start a formal PPC and SEO campaign. I want to advertise more… But I have tons of client and administrative work that must get done, so I’ll only do one out of 6 things on my marketing want-list today.

Next week, I’ll get to one or two more marketing executions as I can afford the time and money. I’m reasonably sure there will be tangible results with each new marketing step I take, as they have consistently produced leads and new business over the months and years – 6 years and counting!

A few of my clients are going through exciting growth periods and this has fueled more comprehensive marketing programs to spread our messages out to additional media channels. This kind of incremental approach over time reduces the stress of “burn rates” and high expectations from partners, banks and investors. The cash in your bank account has no strings and can be more freely spent on the right priorities – yours!

The post Incremental Marketing over Capitalized Marketing appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.