Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome to Five Minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Hope you’re doing well. hope everything’s going well for y’all. I want to talk about today, how marketing and sales is the life source of a company.

I’m really going to harp on this a lot, because this was one of the early mistakes that Andrew and I made in business, we did not focus on marketing, and we didn’t focus on sales. And it actually cost us a lot more in the long run, because we were focusing on being better or making sure that we had a great product to offer and all these things. And that is important, it is important to make sure you get your offerings, correct, it is important to make sure you build your offerings and is important to make sure that you’re actually giving the value you promise and the outcomes you promise to your customers and clients. The problem is, some of us though, get stuck like I did in this cycle of I need to perfect this, I need to be better than this, I need to prove my value for this. And as a result, we never actually begin the stage in the journey of sales and marketing.

And if you don’t have marketing, you’re not going to have sales. And if you don’t have sales, there’s no point in having an offering or a product because nobody’s going to buy it. And it’s so easy to miss. Because we get caught up in all this stuff that doesn’t seem to matter. We get caught up in all these thought processes that don’t really matter that well What if it’s not good enough? What if it’s not that, and the thing is, is this is where the mindset comes in of continual improvement, you have to fly the plane, and you have to ship it, but then you’ve also got to improve it, as you’re going down the road, you have to continue to improve the business to improve the offering while you’re doing business with your clients. And as long as you’re communicating and talking with them. And as long as you’re owning the mistakes you made and you’re taking care of them, you’re not just out to be greedy, or screw them over, it is going to end up being okay.

And it is going to end up actually being better than okay, because oftentimes you’ll see that trust develops between you and your customer, because you’re actually talking to them and listening to them. But if you’re not gonna have marketing and sales, you’re not gonna have customers. And so Andrew and I, we didn’t focus on marketing and sales, we focused on building the offering. And we focused on building the processes. But we did that to a fault. It really halted a lot of the business growth and a lot of the business revenue. And it’s been a backtracking journey to make sure that we actually take care of ourselves and actually feed life into the company. You can think of marketing, like the nutrients that a tree needs to gather from all the soil to bring life into the tree for it to grow, for it to produce, and for it to continue to live. And that’s the same thing.

Here’s another mistake, because we’ve done a lot of marketing for companies, a lot of small businesses and a lot of medium sized businesses, when things get tight, the first thing they do is cut marketing spend. And that is one of the number one things not to do. It really is it’s one of the number one things not to do because no marketing means no leads no leads means no sales, no sales means no growth or it means negative growth, because now you’re shrinking because your revenue is increasing. And there’s a difference. If you are at full bench utilization, and you have no more room to grow until you expand internally. I’m not talking about that I’m talking about when money gets tight when things get tight. One of the first things to go is well let me cut the marketing spend, or let me cut this or cut that. And I know that not everybody’s budget, especially when you’re smaller, is enormous. But you should be spending a good chunk of change into your marketing into get quality marketing, not just let me just do some reviews and these sorts of things. Because the marketing will leverage your time you’ll find that as a small business owner, you don’t have to network as much. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But if you have good marketing, the marketing will help drive a network to you. And I think it’s so important to see that it to see marketing in that light that it is an extension in it is a lot more powerful to drive your network to you.

And so if you’re a small business and things get tight, one of the first things you don’t need to do is to cut the marketing budget you need to find other expenses to cut, because marketing is your lifeblood. So if you’re just starting out, you need to focus on getting your offering right or your product but then at the same time you need to focus on start marketing, and you’re one person so you need to think about how you can market the most efficient way humanly possible.

Anyways guys, that’s the rant for today so I’ll catch you later peace