When in Doubt – Start Marketing

One of General George Patton’s guiding principles was, “When in doubt, attack.” This sentiment was also expressed by many other famous military commanders. Their point was that although conditions are not always right and the outcome can be uncertain, you are usually better off going on the offensive and generate leads instead of sitting back and waiting for perfect conditions. This is equally true with your B2B marketing efforts.

So why do we hesitate instead of acting? Here are five common reasons:

1. Fear. We are afraid that what we do will not work properly. There is certainly cause to be concerned if you spend precious company resources without achieving decent results. But on the other hand, if you venture nothing, you gain nothing. And every time you market, you learn something that will improve your effective marketing results in the future. The more you practice building awareness and generating leads the better you get at these important skills.
2. Lack of knowledge. In this case, you may want to be an aggressive marketer, but don’t know the right steps to take. Fortunately, there are tons of online and printed resources available to guide you, as well as competent marketing professionals standing by to help. Here are a few recent posts to help you get started.
   • Where to Find B2B Sales Leads
   • Where to Find B2B Leads
   • Social Media Marketing
3. Lack of time. We all face our share of daily distractions. Most of the time, these competing priorities are caused by good intentions: customers to service, products to create, and financials to manage. But as important as these tasks are, you also need to generate leads and maintain an active marketing and sales funnel, because this is the lifeblood of your business.
4. Limited resources. Lack of budget is a familiar problem for marketers. After all, if you have no budget, or a limited budget, you can’t conduct marketing campaigns. Right? Wrong. There are some marketing tools that you can launch on a shoestring budget. One of the best is social media. For ideas in this area, read my recent blog post, Social Media – Can It Be Used to Generate Leads and Revenue?
5. Complacency. If you want to predict an organization’s future, take a look at what they have been doing in the past. Companies that market aggressively now are likely to do so in the future and those that sit on their hands are likely to continue to do so. Some companies work hard to generate leads and others place less emphasis on this. In other words, inertia can work for you or against you. And the best way to break the do-nothing marketing cycle is to do something, and do it now.

Your job as a marketer is to make people aware of the benefits of what you do and then motivate them to take action. But the relevant point is that you can’t get prospects to take action until you first take some action yourself. So go build some awareness, generate leads and support your company’s revenue goals.