Step 4: Turn It On

The final step in The Customer Factory marketing model is pulling the trigger - and continuing to pull it for as long as you own your business.

While some Customer Factories begin driving sales right away, most take a little time to begin generating measurable results. You have to keep pouring the coal to your plan until you start seeing them.

Just as importantly, you can’t stop working your plan just because your plan begins to work. Many business owners make the mistake of pulling back their marketing energies and resources because sales are doing very well. You can’t predict when the next downturn will arrive and by the time it does it may be too late to get the wheels of your Customer Factory turning again in time to avoid a significant slump.

Successful businesses not only create effective marketing plans, they also implement them, continuously.

Why do you think you continue to see television ads and infomercials for Video Professor? Because the Professor’s indirect-response marketing assembly line continues to persuade thousands of people every month to order a free computer training disk “for just the cost of shipping.” His Customer Factory works and he’s working it for the long haul.

A big success factor in Step 4 is tracking your results. You must set a baseline of what your sales and sales sources were before you flipped the switch on your Customer Factory and how they change over time. Your front-line salespeople and order forms must explicitly ask customers how they came to you. Coupons, mail-back cards, toll-free numbers and web sites must all be coded to track lead sources.

If this all sounds like a lot of work - well, it can be, especially when you’re first setting up your system. But this investment of time and energy up front also allows many successful business owners to travel the world while tracking their daily results remotely through the Internet.

How’s that for a successful outcome?