Last week, our top sales rep told us his secret sauce for repeatedly exceeding his quota. He summarized it as follow: “Look guys, just keep it simple” …
- Find how who has the money
- Find out how much they have
- Sell to them as fast as you can
While they are many other best practices that he shared with us, his success recipe reminded me how much we, as marketers, tend to over-complicate things. We like to come up with a messaging full of superlatives and other buzz words, build as many strategies and campaigns as possible, and produce countless numbers of collaterals and sales supporting tools etc.
While this makes all of us feel good, excess is usually not associated with efficiency. In fact in these days over information overflow, less is more.
Folks in the design world know that perfectly. They’ve even coined an acronym for it: K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yet simplicity is not easy to achieve. What makes a striking design stand out is that it contains no unnecessary elements.
As marketers, we should continuously search for those unnecessary elements, whether strategies, tactics, words or tools. After all we all know that simplicity is necessary in order to properly convey an idea. Think Apple’s iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket.
My (simple) advice: stick to the basics
- Know your audience
- Identify their buying cycle
- Focus on driving revenues
What about you, how do you keep it simple?
Image Credit – ImageLink
