BACK TO BASICS

In his classic military strategy book, On War, Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” The noted professional speaker, Brian Tracy, once told me that successful people and companies are “brilliant at the basics.”

My own experience with top organizations and leaders bears out those statements. The truly successful do focus on the basics and keeping things as simple as possible. This certainly doesn’t mean that focusing on the simple and basic are easy by any means, though. My own tendency is to make things more complicated than I need to. I’m always looking for “new” ways of running my business, “new” ways of generating more clients, “new” ways of marketing, and on and on.

Fortunately for me, I’ve had some great teachers, like Brian. A number of years ago I was talking with another good friend, Dan Kennedy, who is a direct marketing expert. I was lamenting the need to create some new marketing ideas for creating more business. Dan asked what I had done to attract clients when I first started my company. I told him I had created a very simple, inexpensive, two-step direct marketing system.

“Did it work?” he asked?

“Oh yeah,” I responded. “It worked out great!”

“And are you still doing that?”

“Well, no, I’m not.”

“Why not? It worked back then didn’t it? Why did you stop?”

I realized he had me there. Why did I stop using a system that worked so well for me in the beginning? The answer was fairly obvious. I had grown bored with doing the same thing over and over again, and new technology provided me with lots of cool ways to replace the old, simple marketing system. Nowadays, because of Dan’s advice, I periodically go back and revisit my marketing strategies. When I find myself wandering away from the simple and reliable system, as I inevitably do, I push myself back on track.

The last couple of years have been hard for all industries, there’s no getting around that. The stock market rode the wildest roller coaster in history. Our personal sense of security has been dashed. From a pure business perspective, technology has given us more and more tools for communicating with our target markets.

Maybe as we look ahead to 2007 and beyond, it’s time to step back, revisit the simple and the basic, and ask ourselves the question, “What did we used to do that worked and yet we no longer do?”

The answer for a lot of companies would be to revisit their approach to exhibiting. It’s always been common practice for new, growing organizations to use major trade shows as leaping off events in their industries. Generating leads, writing orders, and creating new relationships have always been the cornerstones of any small, cash-starved company’s success. And where else could you do all that and get great exposure to the marketplace than at your industry’s big show?

The problem arises as a company grows up. As a company succeeds, it typically establishes a strong system for personally communicating with its customers. As it gets bigger, it may even grab a big enough share of market where there simply are no new leads to get. Add to that the dynamic nature of industries, new distribution channels, the blurring of the value chain, new technology, and … well, the trade show may not be keeping up.

But, like Dan taught me, maybe that’s exactly the right time to revisit the tools that got you here in the first place. Keep it simple and basic.

I believe the purpose of business is to create and maintain long-term profitable, customer relationships. For most corporations, the trade show is used to accomplish the first of those two purposes – to create new relationships. But what about the second – to maintain relationships? Not many corporations see the trade show as a vehicle for that.

But what better tool do you have for maintaining an important relationship? After all, why do people do business with you? It’s because they see you, your company, and your products or services as the best and most trusted choice in an overcrowded marketplace. It only makes sense that you would use every opportunity to reinforce that intelligent decision. Where else will your customers have a better occasion to go through the competitive comparison process than in the three-dimensional, face-to-face, hands-on trade show environment?

Because of the tremendous advances in technology, all of us are overexposed on a daily basis to hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing messages. We’re downloading spam filters and pop-up ad killers just to exert some type (any type!) of control over the daily attack on our senses. In this new paradigm, computers and the network do most of the work, such as data gathering, decision-making, customer response, and much more. It’s all so complicated!

I’m all for using every one of these fantastic high-tech tools to accomplish Persistent Presence in the mind of your customers and prospects. The marketplace will continue to invent imaginative, high-tech ways of engaging our customers. But maybe a good balance would be to refocus a part of that emphasis on one tried and true sales and marketing tool, the trade show, and being, as Brian said, “brilliant at the basics.”

It could be simple.

©2004 Steve Miller