Grant Cardone - If You're Not First, You're Last - Sales Strategies to Dominate Your Market and Beat Your Competition

Forget yesterday and keep all your attention on what you’re going to do to create a new tomorrow. Reassessing your list of potential clients should be an operating basis at all times, but it’s even more critical now. Remember to be hungry and that no one likes arrogance. You need clients, relationships, business flow, action, new relationships, and new business. You need to adjust for any loss in opportunities and revenue due to the constraints on the marketplace. These new considerations—and your willingness to work with a broader range of people—may cause you to find yourself opening up to opportunities you’ve never imagined before, expanding your power base, and finding sales and clients that you might have missed, denied, or overlooked during better times.

One of the first things individuals and businesses do during periods of contraction is reduce their advertising and marketing. Big mistake. Now is the time to hammer your business into the marketplace with cost-effective marketing plans that let the world know who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer. Despite your tendency to want to save money in any way possible, now is not the time to retreat. Let your competitors’ contract to the point that they no longer exist while you press your bet, and if you are going down, go down swinging.

It’s especially important now to be at the fore in your clients’—and potential clients’—minds. While this expand-and-conquer action is completely counterintuitive to all the bad news, you must effectively and aggressively market yourself and your business if you are going to survive, prosper, and capture market share from your competitors.

Obviously, you want to be smart about this tactic and avoid spending money on strategies that don’t work. When things get slow, increase the amount of time you spend on marketing and prospecting for new business. You’re usually able to get the best price for traditional advertising and marketing campaigns during slowdowns since other people are doing less advertising. In addition to traditional approaches, research and employ creative ways to make your organization more widely known within the circles and communities in which you sell. For instance, if you usually devote 10 percent of your time and energy to marketing and prospecting when things are fairly busy, you might increase this to 50 percent when things are slow.

As we’ve discussed previously, a lull in business requires that you expend extra effort to attract clients, follow up on leads, and stay in contact with and extend your power base. While you can accomplish this through traditional advertising, you can also utilize some activities that don’t cost any money: phone calls, personal visits, mail, e-mails, fliers, social networking on the Internet, church activities, newsletters, seminars, briefings, “good news” newsletters, instructional videos, community involvement, magazine writing, taking on a public office, speaking at rotary clubs, coaching your kid’s soccer team—and so on. Most if not all of these methods are fairly original, build tremendous goodwill, get you better known, and cost nothing but your time and energy!

The second part of this approach dictates that whatever you do, be sure you stick with it. Take action consistently and aggressively during every day, week, and month and throughout the year. You must commit to a marketing program throughout the year—not just when you need the business—in order for any one of these initiatives to work. Whether it’s a traditional advertisement or some of the other, more innovative marketing strategies already mentioned, make sure you can stay with it because all marketing takes some time to get traction. When planning a public relations or advertising campaign, I look at how much it will cost to run that program over the course of a year, not a week or month. While this technique ensures a steady stream of new business contacts in the future, it isn’t guaranteed to reap immediate results. The promotion you conduct today sets in motion a selling cycle that will result in new business when you need it six months into the future.

It is just as important that this campaign enhance your reputation throughout the community or circles in which your product is needed. In addition, the fact that you are out there doing something about your business—instead of just sitting idly at your desk, waiting for things to turn around—will give you added confidence.

The types of marketing that work best in an economic contraction—and during all economies, since they are most effective—are a combination of results-oriented direct marketing (direct-response print ads, sales letters, self-mailers, special offers) and low-cost or no-cost visibility-enhancing publicity techniques (press releases, articles, speeches, booklets, seminars, newsletters, radio and TV interviews). For instance, my company offers free seminars. I do at least 25 of these per year to introduce people to my company, ideas, products, and services in order to continue to expand my future possibilities. Yes, it costs time and energy, but not doing these things risks the company’s future. Don’t think of marketing in terms of just costing money since a lot of efforts can be made without any budget just by utilizing your energy. For example, over the course of one week, I personally did 15 radio interviews, met with a group of businesspeople who were located three hours from my office, had two free post-seminar private-speaking engagements, sent out 50 books with a personal note to business owners around the country, and wrote and mailed a combination newsletter-video e-mail to contacts in my entire database.

Attack every aspect of your marketing platform with massive action and energy. Massive is defined in the dictionary as “large in comparison with what is typical.” My own personal definition is “that amount of action that will create new problems for yourself and your company.”

Yes, you read that right. You want to create new problems. Most people stop short of this approach; in fact, they usually try to avoid all problems, just to end up with the same old boring recurring situations that they have had for years. People don’t advance and conquer because they don’t take enough action or follow this up with more massive action. They then end up with dull, familiar problems instead of adventurous and positive problems. Massive is critical to making your marketing efforts effective.

Never try to replace the more labor-intensive marketing efforts mentioned earlier with traditional paid advertising. And never assume that just because you don’t own a company that you don’t need to advertise and market yourself . The goal is to advance and conquer, not just be along for whatever ride the economy provides. Increase your responsibility to change your conditions by doing more marketing for yourself, independent of the company.

One of the reasons people become so insecure when unemployment goes up during a period of contraction is because they become aware that they are at risk. You have to aggressively and effectively learn to market yourself, or you will experience downturns in your business—even during thriving economic conditions. It is a misconception today among salespeople and employees that the company should do the advertising and marketing and those who work there should just collect paychecks. This line of thinking renders the individual more dependent upon the company, leaving him or her more intensely affected by whatever the business experiences. That person ultimately becomes a slave, with no control over his or her own economy. Individuals should be treated and conduct themselves like a business within the business, with the intent of creating their own economies that run because of their own production.