Internet consultant

1. You are looking for business growth

I suppose nearly all businesses are looking for business growth but perhaps the tactics you have been employing over time have not been delivering the reults of late. Or perhaps your competitors are acquiring more new business than you. Marketplaces are constantly changing shape. There can be a multitude of changes taking place that slowly eat into the effectiveness of your current marketing spend. An external view of your current plans could be invaluable.

2. You are looking to reverse recent business decline.

Things are definitelty not going as planned. You could argue that your reduced profits do not allow you the luxury of employing an external consultant. This could be a seriously false economy. A short (and inexpensive) consultation might be of help; perhaps the answer is to cut loose on certain products and focus on others.

3. You are looking to launch new products or services.

This can very often mean you are entering into new market sectors or even new markets. It is quite possible that your companies experience of marketing tactics are totally ineffective in this new area. At the very least they will be of altered relevance. The development of a clearly defined (and communicable) competitive edge is invauable and time spent up front developing this can reap much greater rewards in the long run.

4. You feel that the energy you are putting into your business is not turning into sufficient sales/profits. Your current resources could be more appropriately targeted

You may not be spending huge budgets on an area of your business but the resources in terms of man hours or assets is totally out of sync with the sales or profits you are generating. Very frustrating. Given that you have probably already spent a lot of your time trying to resolve this, this problem is crying out for external thought.

Marketing must not be confused with sales.
Marketing must not be confused with advertising.

Both sales and advertising are but two weapons in the marketing armoury. The other weapons include tactics such as PR, promotions, sponsorship, websites, leaflets, etc etc. If you have a well thought-through and planned marketing strategy it will become quite obvious which weapons within this vast armoury should be deployed in order for you to hit your business objectives. Unfortunately, many businesses do not go through this process and as a consequence continue to invest large sums of money in methods of promotion which are inappropriate for business goals. And invariably the company concerned does not have knowledge (let alone expertise) of these other tactics and hence is unable to do anything different to what it has done for the past 2, or 5, or 10, or 20 years!

One of the best examples of this is the assumption that the only element that brings in sales is the face-to-face salesman; and that the only way to increase sales is to put 'more bums on seats'. The true cost of an additional salesman in a company is about 3 times the salary, so this becomes a very expensive strategy to follow.
Perhaps it can only ever be a salesman who actually takes the order but:

• there are ways of generating more sales lead
• there are ways of generating more qualifiedsales leads
• there are ways of generating more business from existing customers
• there are ways of reducing customer reluctance to purchase

Perhaps the strategy is so successful you only need a sales order processing department to take incoming telephone orders! That would improve your profitability I am sure.