To Sell More, Stick to Those Who Will Get the Message and Care about It

Wake up. The avant-garde is dead. It's been marketed.

--William Self

Who might care about your offering besides you and those who get paid to care? That may sound like a sarcastic question, but actually it's a humble and important query that everyone needs to make.

In practice, most offerings are purchased and used by relatively few people and organizations as a percentage of all people and organizations. When you spend time marketing to those who never will care, you are wasting time and resources that could be better applied to those who do or could care.

One of my favorite examples of this point was the initial positioning of low-calorie beers: They were marketed to women who didn't drink beer. Not surprisingly, that didn't work very well.

Then, along came the Miller Brewing Company which marketed its Lite product to men who drank lots of beer and wanted to be able to drink more without feeling too full and to have a good taste in their mouths while doing it. The "Less Filling, More Taste" debate format in the advertising allowed Lite to feature two reasons that heavy beer drinkers (pun intended) accounted for over 80 percent of consumption.

You would think that such a fundamental lesson wouldn't escape too many marketers. Well, just to show how important it is to pay attention, let me share an example of how I fell into making the same mistake as the people trying to sell low-calorie beer only to non-beer-drinking women.

With the naive enthusiasm of first-time authors, Carol Coles and I set out to wow even more people with our book. In prior years, we had made it a practice to attend annual meetings of organizations to which our clients belonged. Typically, we would host some small dinners and meetings at these events to express our thanks for client support. We would meet other people with whom we could chat later in the year about potential assignments.

That plan was too modest for me now that we were authors. For the next convention, we built a booth and became an exhibitor.

Rather than describing our traditional services, we just promoted our book. Smiling broadly to everyone who passed, we were disappointed when people found everything other than talking about our book to be more interesting.

We did not exhibit to promote our book again.

Such unsuccessful experiences were more instructive to improving our marketing than being carried along by the online sales avalanche had been. Most things you do to promote a new idea don't work so there's lots of room to learn.

Also, our book's ideas seemed to be a harder sell than most improvement concepts. The idea of accomplishing exponentially more with the same time, effort, and resources simply didn't excite -- or even interest -- the average person who worked for a company.

Why not? Presumably most corporate leaders realized that they wouldn't gain anything for themselves by becoming remarkably more productive. Why bother to learn?

What should we have done instead? We should have initially done what we ultimately did . . . focus on those who felt a burning desire to accomplish more such as those who enjoy being more successful for its own sake, those who cared about the benefits accomplishing more would bring to customers and beneficiaries, and people who wanted to learn how to be more effective entrepreneurs. Had we started with that market, we would have made progress, well, exponentially faster. It's an important lesson.

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