A ton of material has been written about sales and marketing. Most of it is geared toward what works for big corporations.

Most “textbook” sales and marketing activities require a huge investment in time and money in order to be effective. Implementing almost any sales or marketing activity with less than a complete commitment to the program is throwing your money away. 

I have found for myself and my clients that spending money on “sales and marketing” seems like a good thing, so it is easy to get caught up spending money on activities that are not cost effective.

In my business, when I stopped talking about “sales and marketing activities” with “getting customer activities,” it became obvious that many our sales and marketing activities were not producing enough results to justify the cost.  The reason it became effective was that it changed the question I was asking. Instead of “is this a good sales and marketing program?” I asked “is this program getting us customers?

One activity I stopped was casual networking, such as chamber events. Over the last 12 years, almost all of our clients and customers have come from either previous clients or people we had relationships with. We have gotten almost no revenue from the casual networking and these events can consume a lot of time. That time is being spent much more effectively now strenghtening our relationships and finding new relationships through our existing customer and relationship base.

I do not mean to imply that casual networking will not work for you. But unless you have an unlimited budget of time and money, consider looking at each of your activities in terms of how much business you are or will get.