The Bottom Line

Most marketing strategies don’t make the impact that they should on your bottom line. They don’t link to your shareholder value strategy – so they can’t "get to the base."

There are only 3 strategies to drive growth:
 Product strategies.
 Customer acquisition strategies.
 Customer retention strategies.

Virtually every company has a product strategy. Perhaps not a winning strategy, but at least it’s a roadmap. This drives product plans, R&D and hard asset investment and – unfortunately – sales and marketing budgets.

Why "unfortunately?" - - Because companies can make the mistake of budgeting sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue. It seems reasonable, but it ignores the key task of sales and marketing … to generate and keep customers who will buy your product.

Strategic advantage comes from doing what it takes to generate customers and keep them. At times, it may only take 15% of revenue. Or, perhaps it takes 45% of revenue up front to build a customer base that will only require 7% of revenues later on.

It takes well constructed customer acquisition and retention strategies to drive your growth. Many companies don’t have them.

Those who do, win. The others ultimately lose