Fighting For What You Need

These days the objection I hear constantly is, "We can't afford to spend any money on marketing." Yet, as a strategic consultant, I know that in order to achieve the very financial objectives we've agreed we must attain, marketing is a must. If I allow the client to hit short term budget goals by doing no marketing this quarter, they will find themselves in a negative-momentum spiral which is guaranteed to make "next quarter" (and the next) even more difficult than the current one.

My success --- and the reputation on which I grow my business -- is built on client stations achieving their goals. So, simply helping my clients create great strategies and tactics that never got implemented due to constant budget pressures is not just bad for my client's business, it can also be disastrous to mine as well. In other words, I simply must find a way to help clients improve their shares.

This means, from the consultant's perspective, that everyone on my clients' management team must be clear on what our goals are, what it will take in terms of cume building marketing, brand awareness building visibility and improved time spent listening, as well as the specific programming elements and improvements that we must do in order to hit those numbers.

Selling The Need For Marketing

I try to enunciate my viewpoint on what those issues are for as many on the management team as possible. I work hard to do so, in such a way that all team members agree. It is crucial that we do these things so that we can all share in the success that we need. If there are any misgivings, we need to air them and deal with them as the plan and budgets are created.

Once that agreement has been attained, it's sometimes necessary as to reaffirm that the goals have not changed and that the market situation hasn't been altered in anyway as to hinder our potential to hit our goals without doing the things we planned to do.

I remind my client of the definition of insanity: Doing the same things and expecting different results. This requires active listening to be certain that if the problems are the same. And yet we simply can't do what we all felt we had to, in spite of the fact that expectations have not changed.

Know When To Change Tactics

Many times, just reinforcing these hard competitive realities is all it takes to convince the person who might be standing in the way -- of doing what needs to be done because of conflicting priorities that we may not have been aware of.

But, at times, it is simply impossible to get around the roadblock.

In those cases, it is often necessary to change tactics and find co-generative promotional partners who may be able to work cooperatively with us to help fund crucial initiatives. And, should that also be impossible to achieve, it is then time to reassess the goals and the strategies we decided upon. Is there another way to achieve what we want to do?

Reconsider The Days Of Old

For example, instead of a direct attack, perhaps we need to reconsider guerilla/buzz marketing tactics (loyalty/direct marketing, a street presence, etc.) or a flanking maneuver (moving to uncontested territory).

Personally, I have found the good ole Barnes & Noble edition of Sun Tzu's "Art of War" helpful in communicating to clients how irrevocable the basics of the marketing battlefield can be. It's also helpful at times to do a review of the 'Ries and Trout' literature from basics of positioning to Marketing Warfare to Focus, and on to their most recent writings.

Overcoming this objection requires a combination of listening carefully, communicating credibly and reinforcing market realities.

The Good News!

The good news: it gets easier every time you do it. As a client gains trust in your advice, acts on it and sees winning results, even loftier budget goals become easier to hit, and willingness to take the risk of investing in future growth becomes less of a leap of faith -- and more of a positively-reinforced habit.