Marketing Magic

By Sue Clayton

Do you have questions about how you should market your homebased business? Kim Gordon has the answers. She is president of National Marketing Federation Inc., an association of marketing experts that specializes in helping homebased business owners. She is also the author of Growing Your Home-Based Business (Prentice Hall).

How important are sales and marketing to a homebased business?

About five years ago, before trends turned toward working at home and before corporate downsizing, there might have been 50 competitiors in your niche in a major city. Now, there may be 500. Competition has become very heated. Everybody is in business for themselves these days. With the competition this intense, it's essential to your bottom line that you master sales and marketing skills.

What's the most critical mistake you believe homebased business owners make?

They wait until it's too late to start marketing. Because your business is homebased, you have to do the work and the marketing yourself. So whenever things get a little too busy, homebased business owners tend to put marketing on the back burner and do it only during the slow times.

What happens is they will get a contract and work very hard on that assignment for several months. When they finish that project, they suddenly realize they need to get more business. Then they market like crazy for another three months. They put themselves on an economic nightmare diet, where it's either feast or famine.

So how much time should a homebased business owner spend on marketing?

If you're not spending about 40 percent of your time on sales and marketing, you're probably not going to be able to expand your company effectively. To do that, you have to sit down with your calendar and say that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (or Tuesdays and Thursdays), between these hours, you need to focus on marketing.

Homebased businesses used to be viewed as unprofessional. Do you think that's still a problem?

I think we've really overcome that. Twenty-four million people run businesses from their home, 11 million telecommute, and nearly 7 million people are in "virtual" corporations. We no longer have to worry about people taking us seriously. But what we do have to worry about is their seeing us as a viable and professional resource for their business.

You have to remember-as a homebased business owner, you don't have an executive office suite. You don't have salespeople knocking on doors for you or a glitzy storefront. So your biggest challenge is creating an image that says "I'm a real business." You want people to know you're permanent and professsional.

How do homebased businesses compete with established competitors that have bigger budgets and larger staffs?

Homebased business owners have to position their companies against their largest, out-of-home competitors. They have to do a competitive audit and get all the materials every competitor would use, whether they're homebased or a multimillion- dollar company. Then review them and look for similarities and key selling points. Only then can homebased business owners create quality materials that stand up to their largest competitors'. Homebased business owners are competing against a broad range of suppliers, vendors and companies, and the look of the home business's materials says a lot about the company.

But new homebased business owners often have very small budgets. Can they really afford to spend money on quality sales and marketing materials?

Yes. Professional, high-quality materials actually lower the cost of selling. Your materials, if they are effective, will move your prospects closer to a buying decision. They will help close sales. They'll also make it necessary for you to call on fewer prospects. People are mistaken when they think they will save by not spending a lot of money on quality marketing materials. They're actually costing themselves money because they are losing out on every prospect they send their materials to.

Which sales and marketing materials does a business need?

It's important that people think of their tools in terms of families of materials, instead of simply saying "I need a brochure." They should ask themselves: When I sell to somebody, when I'm in their office, what do I hand them? Would it be my brochure? Will I need a folder to carry that? How will I present my proposal? Asking these questions will identify the tools your business needs.

What should marketing materials say?

I think the single most important thing to learn is the difference between what you are selling and what your client is buying. Because nobody buys based on features. They only buy based on benefits. This is a particular challenge to people who are selling services.

Can you give an example?

Say I'm a bookkeeeper and want to sell prospects on the benefits of my bookkeeping service. You'll typically see a brochure from a bookkeeper that will say "15 years of experience, will work with large and small firms, quick turnaround, error-free guarantee." That kind of information never motivates anybody to employ your service, because you're not telling the customer what they want to hear.

What they want to know about your bookkeeping company is: What does that 15 years of experience mean to me? Can you improve my cash flow, which means I'll have more cash on hand, which means I can now pay my bills on time, which means you can improve my credit rating? Now you've got something customers are interested in.