Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

For a dozen reasons, conduct oral surveys, not written ones.
The One Question You Should Never Ask
What don’t you like about the company or the service?”
Don’t ask that.
You’re asking someone to admit they made a bad decision in choosing that
company. People won’t do that; people like to look smart.
Never ask “What don’t you like?”
Focus Groups Don’t
A typical discussion:
“We need some information.”
“OK, let’s do a focus group.”
It’s very tempting to summon focus groups. For one thing, the term “focus
groups” is clever packaging. A “survey” sounds like something that only gives
you the lay of the land. “Focus group,” by contrast, sounds like something that
gets you zeroed in.
Or so you would think.
But you are selling individuals, not groups. Focus groups tell more about
group dynamics than about market dynamics. Control types take over focus
group sessions and try to persuade the others. The wise but shy types sit quietly,
waiting for the hour to end. People’s views get changed and distorted by other
people’s views.
You’re selling individuals.Talk to individuals.

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Marketing Is Not a Department
A Twin Cities business-to-business company has excellent service, strong
salespeople, award-winning sales collateral, and a problem:
The company believes that sales and marketing are for the sales and
marketing people.
As a result, that company is carrying an enormous marketing liability. Their
CFO is negligent, unresponsive, and rude. People who deal with the CFO have a
tainted view of the company, even though the CFO is the only bad apple they’ve
tasted there.
The CFO cost his company over $50,000 in business last year just from one
source of referrals:
Me.
The president of Seasonal Concepts, Albert Schneider, stresses how fragile a
service business is: “We can have great talent, products, prices, and advertising.
But if that sales clerk at the end of the line fails, everything fails. The buyer
doesn’t return. And if the buyer suffers a very bad experience, he tells all his
friends not to come, either.”
Everyone in your company is responsible for marketing your company.
Every failure is likely to be costly.
More than half of all Japanese companies do not even bother to have
marketing departments, because they believe that everyone in the company is