The source grades promotion by quality and names what marks the poor kind. Seven of the failures it names bear directly on a small business. This article takes three of them: irregularity, a neglected list, and focusing on customers who look warm.
Some of these failures look like a sound decision from the outside, which makes them hard to spot when they have no name.
The failures that have a name
The source's list includes, among others, promoting without finding out what the audience wants, sending promotion to the wrong groups of people, and writing form letters that go to everybody. It also names letting the customer files fall behind, and cutting prices or making strange offers.
A name helps because it turns a vague feeling that something is not working into a specific failure you can check in your own business.
Suppose a business owner who sends the identical message to every customer, including one who bought a week ago. That is the form letter failure, and the customer who bought a week ago receives a message that was never written for him.
When the source reaches the worst grade of poor promotion, the first item it lists is “Promotes with total unreality and seldom.” The word that matters here is seldom. The source places irregularity in its worst grade.
Suppose a business owner who advertises only when work thins out. By that grading he sits in the worst grade, even if every ad he runs is well written.
The costliest mistake
Out of all the failures, the source singles one out: a contact database that is out of date and not in use is “about the most costly error an org can make.” Org is the source's shorthand for an organization.
Notice the word costly. Every dollar you spent winning those customers keeps draining away, and nobody ever sees a line for it in the accounts. The damage builds up unseen.
Suppose a business owner who discovered that a quarter of the addresses on her list were wrong. Every one of them had cost her money once, and none brings her anything now.
Compare a ceramics studio owner who corrects a phone number during every call she takes. It costs ten seconds each time, and her list stays valid.
This ties straight back to the customer list. A list that nobody writes to decays, and whoever fails to update it loses exactly the customers they already paid to win.
The hot prospect trap
The sixth failure deserves a pause, since it sounds like sensible focus. A hot prospect system puts your effort into whoever looks close to buying and neglects everyone else.
It sounds entirely logical. It is also the decision behind the cut made by London, the organization in the booklet's chapter on rhythm, which shrank its magazine to 700 hot files.
The difficulty is that you cannot know in advance who is warm. What you have is a sense of who looks warm, and that sense is built from your own guesswork. Sometimes the buyer is the person you never marked.
Suppose a business owner who labelled ten prospects hot and spent a month on them. Two deals arrived, from two people who had not been on that list at all.
Compare the same owner sending to everybody and putting personal effort into whoever replied. Here the customers mark themselves, and the marking no longer depends on a guess.
The conclusion of the chapter is that a warm customer is the result of a response, and an advance estimate cannot produce one.
What the three have in common
The three failures can all pass for routine: advertise when you need to, leave the list alone when you are busy, focus on whoever seems promising.
Each of them also hits a different basic of promotion. Irregularity damages the offer, because nothing is offered while nothing goes out. A neglected list damages the accumulation of identities, the third basic. Focusing on the warm ones narrows both.
The booklet ends this chapter with a short self-test that links the failures to the five basics and helps you find which one is broken in your business. It also has a closing practice section, with a diagnosis exercise and a decision exercise, followed by a self-check.
If you promote only when the work runs out, or you have not written to your list for a long time, you have already found two of the failures. Both look like routine, and both cost you money.