Can You Love a Sloppy Business?
I once wrote an article entitled “Learning to Love a Sloppy Business.”
I pointed out that it’s an odd viewpoint from an M.B.A. and business school professor who digs down into spreadsheets on a weekly basis trying to find absolute truth in data.
But for small firms like interior design firms, the cost of pursuing perfection is way too high, which means they must learn to live with some inefficiency…but not ineffectiveness!
Which means it’s vital to understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
And It’s only the latter—effectiveness—that you should care about.
Marketing is the easiest way to make this point, so let’s start there. In my “1-Day Marketing Plan” course I suggest you consider targeting a neighborhood or suburb that you know has hundreds of ideal potential ideal clients, and then owning that neighborhood just like the real estate agent who puts American flags in your yard every July 4.
You can reach that target audience a number of ways, but let’s say you’re going to purchase an excellent mailing list by zip code and net worth (easy to find) and mail them a letter or brochure.
If you were a big company, and wanted to be extremely efficient, you might do something like this:
- Purchase the list from multiple vendors and merge/purge to get the latest addresses;
- Run those addresses through postal software to identify deliverables
- Mail multiple variations of the piece, perhaps with separate headlines and tracking codes
- Track all returned mail to update changes of address in the database
- Hire a telemarketing team to follow up (“Did you receive our brochure?”)
- Have a call to action in their mail piece and carefully segment respondents for separate, more personal follow-on campaigns
- Tag respondents in their CRM and enter them in a sales funnel for ongoing “drip” marketing campaigns
