What that is saying is, ?My Marketing Doesn't Work So I'll Never Do That Again!? (I've actually heard that statement).

Most small businesses don't understand how to make it work, so they dip their toe in, try it, and when they don't get what they expect, they leave to never try it again. Yet, generating exactly the number of leads you need every week is not only achievable but rather easy if you understand the principles and failure to understand them results in an 80% failure rate among most small businesses.

Critical Goals (The Keys: Guaranteed success, vs. Highly Probable Failure)

There are a few critical goals and measurements we track in a business. These typically are:

? The number of leads generated weekly (comes from our marketing plan, advertising, networking, referrals, etc.)

? The number of closed sales, and dollars in closed sales every week

? Number of completed jobs (customers, projects, etc), total dollars generated, and profit (gross profit) generated per job every week.

And finally the bottom line generated by the key measurement results above.

? Total dollars sold for the year, profit generated for the year.

? Does the profit generated by your sales pay your overhead.

? After overhead is paid how much extra is generated that goes in your pocket as ?net profit.?

The definition of ?critical? goals: a goal that IF accomplished will result in

? The total dollars of revenue for the year, the overhead is paid, and having a specific defined number of dollars to put in your pocket.

And IF these goals ARE NOT achieved the consequences will be:

? The total dollars of revenue WILL NOT be reached

? You will likely not be paying overhead and the money will be SUCKED out of your pocket instead of putting it into the pocket.

? AND the biggest consequence, you just entered the high probability that your entire business will fail.

Now that we've set the ground work for what critical goals will do for you if you achieve them, and what will be the consequences if you don't, this leaves us with a rule I give all of my clients:

Critical goals are something that YOU WILL do no matter what.

It's likely that there are 50-60 other things pulling on you to get done, but since these 5-6 things are SO CRITICAL (success on one side, failure on the other), then NOTHING else is more important. Stop doing the trivial many and focus on the 5-6 critical things that WILL deliver results, guaranteed.

When it comes to a critical goal that appears difficult, our response to that will not be ?CAN'T? but rather ?HOW??

Now back to our original statement that

My Ads Don't Work, So I don't Do Them Any More

Isn't lead generation, the leads that come from our ads, one of our critical goals

To generate X number of leads EVERY WEEK.

And our rule was Make it happen no matter what, it's not CAN'T but HOW?

If our ads are not delivering what we expected, shouldn't we be figuring out HOW to make them work instead of saying ?they don't work so I'll never do that again.? We just said CAN'T instead of How. The opposite of our ground rule.

Is business really that simple? Just deliver the Critical Goals?

You bet!

How to fix the ad response rates

For most ads I find these are the critical factors:

1) Who we are communicating to

2) What we are saying

3) How we are saying it (and How must be about the benefit of the product, not the name, specifications, features, and especially not about WHO WE ARE.)

I've seen ad response rates jump 10 times on the very next advertisement just from following these ground rules and developing the answers to these questions.