When you have abundant opportunities for making sales, you can achieve your business dreams and lifestyle goals. This is the key to success. Through marketing, you find potential customers and get them familiar with your products or services. Through sales, you convert them into paying customers.

Abundant Opportunities and Profitable Choices
When you have a marketing system that brings you all the opportunities you want, you will be well positioned to make profitable choices. This is because you will be able to choose the best customers or clients to work with and avoid the following:

1. Taking problematic work
2. Working with difficult people
3. Doing jobs or making sales that don’t make enough money
4. Making sales that don’t fit the realm of your business

If you are doing any of the above, then it is time for a change.

Remember, success comes from making good choices – profitable choices. Success does not come from doing everything that comes your way. This is often why businesses specialize in a certain area. Success in business stems from your ability to say no to what doesn’t work.

The Submarine Model of Marketing
Your marketing system should present your business to people who are likely to want to use your product or service. Find the advertising methods that work best for your business and analyze whether online or offline advertising works best for you. Some options are: distributing business cards or flyers with an offer, advertising in the newspaper, and email or social marketing campaigns.

When you market your business, potential clients may not always be interested right away. They may not have a current need for what you offer but may have a need in the future. So you should continue marketing to them so that you will be visible to them when they do need what you offer.  

The marketplace of potential clients is cruising like submarines under water. One of those potential clients has a concern. Their concern raises their periscope to search for a solution. If your business is in the sight lines of that periscope, then you have a high probability of a sales opportunity.

Addressing Potential Customers
Marketing helps potential customers become aware of needs that they are aware of and also ones that they may not be aware of. For example, a potential customer might know that they have neck pain, but not realize that they need your better pillow product. It is good to inform potential customers like this one but it is hard to sell someone a product that they don’t need at all. It is best not to try to convince people who don’t need your product at all but to instead have pre-qualified customers.

Managing Marketing Time
It is essential to allocate time to marketing each week so that your business can grow. It is also necessary for replacing customers that you will no longer be working with. If you own a small business (a one or two person business with less than a million dollar yearly gross), here is how you can manage your marketing time:

1. Spend at least 2 hours a day on marketing and sales (at least 10 hours a week)
2. Of those ten hours a week, 25% should be strictly devoted to marketing

If you follow this formula and maintain a constant level of marketing and sales activity, your sales will increase. You will also be able to hire other people to deliver the work and allocate more time to sales and growth.