Marketing Trap #38: Neglecting the Back End

From 99 Marketing Traps and How to Avoid Them: A Survival Guide for Marketing Pros and Those Who Hire Them*

The only “more” that ultimaely matters in business is more profitability.

I don’t know any CEO in his right mind who wouldn’t agree with that. But if you could show your CEO a fool-proof strategy for increasing profitability by reducing gross sales, what are the chances that he or she would leap to embrace that strategy and implement it immediately?

You’re probably right … the chances of it would not be very good.In fact, there wold be whispers about your sanity.

(That's the problem with most of the Marketing Traps: Staying in them can be so safe, and so hard on your sales.)

That’s why strategic proposals for increasing top-line sales – regardless of how small a dent they might make in profitability – are almost always going to be more popular among C-level executives and their wanna-be’s than any strategy that might seem to limit sales – and sales activities – in exchange for higher profitability.

Corporate executives just have a hard time understanding that you can (usually) make more money by selling less (to the right buyers) than you can by selling more (to the wrong buyers … buyers with less back-end sales potential).

That’s why the back end of the sale is so often not fully leveraged – to the detriment of the bottom line. The resources – and more importantly, the way management measures and rewards achievement – are geared more often toward new customers and top-line sales results.

If You Know Anyone Who's Caught in this Marketing Trap, Here's How to Help Them Out.

You do it with ROI, and with incremental implementation steps.

You need to know your real cost of acquiring new buyers. Then be able to show with numbers the higher profitability of selling to someone who has already bought from you and will require considerably less expense to become motivated to buy again.

The challenge in most organizations is getting those numbers ... real numbers, numbers that can tell you something you can really use. Once you do get those numbers, the higher profitability of selling on the back end will justify itself. Then design a program dedicated to getting more out of back-end selling.

Once you have that program, don’t launch it … test it. Incremental success is the best way to win over a management team locked into top-line thinking.

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