| Welcome to 2005. The year you have a winning marketing strategy that enables you to meet and exceed all your written goals that your management team has agreed to. Hopefully, last year’s strategy was good one - if not then by all means don’t try it again or you will end up in the same place this time next year.
Every company with more than one employee has discovered a winning strategy. It succeeded at something that gave the founder enough confidence to hire someone. When I refer to a “winning strategy” we don’t mean that the strategy is perfect, market dominating, or even good. Just that strategy makes the founder feel like a winner. It’s a strategy that generates results that the people at the company want to repeat again and again. The winning strategy encompasses the habits and decisions that are not up for discussion every day.
Big land mobile dealerships got to be big dealerships because they had a powerful and profitable winning strategy. The little dealership around the corner, despite delivering only a meager living to it’s proprietor, also has a winning strategy, one that the owner sticks with.
At many dealerships, the winning strategy is astoundingly simple and well known by all concerned. At others, it is quite subtle and almost mysterious. Either way, every dealership still around today has a winning strategy or is about to go broke defending an old one.
Without any data at all to back it up, some dealerships have almost a superstitious approach to their marketing strategy. If it worked in the past they expect and have total faith that it will continue to work in the future. As long as the winning strategy stays the same and the competitive environment stays the same, theoretically the dealership will thrive – of course that is as long as it stays in fantasyland.
Replacing a marketing strategy that’s still working is difficult indeed. However, if a dealership doesn’t replace its strategy until it is completely obsolete, it will find that it has neither the time nor the money to find a new one.
Sooner or later, every winning strategy stops working. The competition catches up. Technology changes. The founder quits. When that happens, one of two things occurs: Either the dealership has enough guts to try to find a new winning strategy, or it fades into extinction. Both are accompanied by a great deal of running around, layoffs, task forces, and frenzy.
It used to be that a good winning marketing strategy lasted for a few generations, enough to build a family fortune or at least deliver a great career. Today the rules change often and winning strategies don’t last for long. Discovering your winning strategy and saying it aloud or actually writing it down is critically important in getting ready to change it. Before your dealership has a chance of adopting a new winning strategy, you need to understand why you are stuck in your current strategy. Only then will you have a chance to undo the deep aversion people have to abandoning something they believe is working.
Competent people like to think that they’re competent – no surprise. Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way most every time and that’s what makes them reliable. Competent people resist change because a new winning strategy threatens to make them less competent.
It’s okay to change your strategy, just as it’s okay to change your tactics as long as you stay focused on your destination. If your strategy isn’t working you have to change it and even if it is working you need to continually update it for the future. Strategy happens the same way that marketing positioning happens. Meaning if you don’t have one, your competitors will come up with one for you, most of which will put you in a defensive position and force you to focus on a whole series of random strategies that are unrelated to your business objectives. So we suggest that you develop one for 2005, as opposed to just hoping that one of your competitors develops a good one for you.
Know the answers to these two questions as soon as possible:
- What is our marketing strategy?
- Are we going to make any money?
We don’t believe you can go through business without being committed to strategies, and not just at the top levels. It’s just as important for your people to know and embrace the strategy – perhaps even more than it is for you. Strategy has to inform everything you do. Everything a company does – from the way it paints its trucks, to how long it takes to answer your phones, to what the people in your dealership tell their friends – communicates with public. So everybody in the company needs to know and understand the strategy.
To your success,
The Opt-In Wireless Team
To learn more about how Opt-In Wireless can use science, data and facts to develop an actionable marketing strategy and increase sales for your dealership, contact us today:
sales@optinwireless.com
Midwest Office 219.756.6227
West Coast Office 503.372.9029
This publication may be freely redistributed if copied in its ENTIRETY. Portions of this newsletter may be reprinted with permission. |
