The following is an excerpt taken from “The Automatic Marketing Machine”, written by RJon Robins and Danny Decker.
There are seven main parts of a successful business. There are also seven main parts of a struggling business. The difference between the successful businesses and the businesses that are struggling has much more to do with ignorance, confusion, and inattention to most of these seven main parts than how great the products or services are that the business produces.
RJon’s business, How to Manage Enterprises, helps hundreds of—perhaps, by the time you read this, more than a thousand—small business owners manage and keep each of the seven main parts of a successful business in alignment. But this book is focused on the foundational first of those parts of a successful business: marketing— and we touch upon sales a bit too. That’s because if your marketing does its job well, then sales is simplified and more efficient, which is an important detail to keep in mind. But too many entrepreneurs confuse the two concepts.
So here it is:
Marketing is everything that happens to get the right customers with the right needs and the right expectations to your business. They should arrive already prequalified, pre-educated, preconditioned, and therefore predisposed to do business with you when they arrive.
Many entrepreneurs are surprised to know that part of the job of marketing is also to screen out the wrong kind of prospects—or even the right kind of prospects with the wrong needs and expectations— and protect the business’s resources from being consumed by them.
And more than a few struggling entrepreneurs have been upset at the notion that part of the job of marketing is also to regulate the flow of prospects coming in at the top of the funnel in order to protect their reputation and cash flow by not overwhelming production capacity. If a person is dying of thirst in a desert, it’s understandable that the notion of having too much of a good thing might be foreign to him or her.
An Automatic Marketing Machine allows you to align the flow of new prospects with your business’s capacity to serve them all … which is part of the secret of how we maximize the lifetime value of our relationship with each customer, turning one into two and so many more.
Sales (when done the right way) is an ethical, professional, predictable, and highly profitable system for helping prospects think through and get clarity about where they are today with their situation versus where they would prefer to be tomorrow versus where they would like to avoid being tomorrow if they don’t get some help.
Unfortunately, many prospects walk into a place of business with important problems and walk back out with the same important problems still unresolved. This is because most entrepreneurs have never been trained how to professionally and ethically sell their products and services.
Most entrepreneurs don’t understand what you now do understand about the role of marketing in their business … and so they rely too heavily on sales instead of creating an Automatic Marketing Machine and letting it do its job.
