Here is the fundamental premise on which all marketing is based:

If the consumer isn’t aware that you exist, you can’t sell your product.

When encountering a prospect on the showroom floor or at a trade show, in every case, he or she was “delivered” to that critical point by an awareness of you; whether through an advertisement, a referral or, in the trade show circumstance, merely because you were there.

What takes place at that point is two-way communication (you standing face to face with the prospect, closing the sale). Though your degree of success will be determined by your persuasiveness, product, knowledge, price, etc., something that happened before that gave you the opportunity: a prospect had to be delivered.

At our marketing agency in Phoenix, we have learned – and base much of what we do on – this lesson: In today’s highly competitive marketplace, real success is largely a numbers game. To survive, let alone be a leader in your category, you have to close many sales. In order to do so, you have to have ample numbers of prospects with which to work. This applies whether you are a product or a service, large or small, with a reach that is local regional or national in scope.

Here’s the key point that most marketing, advertising and public relations professionals have learned over the course of the past several months, if, indeed, they didn’t know it previously: developing adequate numbers of prospects cannot be accomplished through two-way communication, either face to face, by phone, the mail or, even, the Internet. Neither you nor your sales staff has anywhere near the time necessary for this crucial function. We have had to talk long and hard, and demonstrate meaningful results to convince many of our clients of this. That because they long have been oriented to a sales force driven model, and sometimes have a difficult time learning “new” and more efficient ways of cost effective customer contact.

Prominent publisher McGraw Hill & Co. has estimated that the average sales call requires approximately 45 minutes, and that an average of three calls is required to close a sale. Surely, it’s no way to prospect.

Prospecting is what marketing  the one-way communication element of sales  is ideally suited for. Expensive, time-consuming two-way communication simply isn’t necessary, nor is it efficient in developing prospects in the numbers sufficient for business success. Marketing communication, in one form or another, is the answer.

Most anti-marketing hard-liners got that way because they, at some point, were turned off by poor marketing efforts that failed to produce results. This is understandable, because much marketing is misguided or misplaced  but it is not justifiable, and, more than likely, will be hazardous to bottom-line business health.

Is marketing foolproof? Will it always produce infallible, guaranteed results? No it won’t, nor is it fair to expect it to (after all, what does?). But it is more science than art, and, as such, has something very important on its side: LOGIC. Marketing is measurable, quite often yielding predictable results, and as practiced by good professionals, should  and most often does  more than pay for itself.