So You Don’t Need To Market?…Okay

If you’re an entrepreneur who quite often says “All this business came from reaching out to my network or them reaching out to me — No marketing at all”….um, let’s talk.

Two things:

#1 When you only work within the limits of your network, you do yourself a disservice by limiting the growth of your business AND your income.

#2 Marketing creates a pipeline of business — yes, future business. Marketing “primes” the sale. Without those two components — marketing and sales — a business eventually dries up and dies.

Marketing is not optional for an entrepreneur, it’s a REQUIREMENT.

Don’t get comfortable and rest on your laurels or personal relationships to feed you/your family for a lifetime. I would advise against that IN BUSINESS.

You see, in business, good things come to an end all the time. And the “end” doesn’t always mean the business totally shuts down, but perhaps a shift in the customers you serve, a pivot to a new market or industry, lower revenues, and leaner times in comparison to before.

Have you heard of a company called Kodak?

How about GE (General Electric)?

And Blockbuster?….

You know how people say, “Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready”? It’s true 💯.

And part of your “getting ready” as an entrepreneur is marketing your business, yourself, your capabilities, your value.

Also, I would be remiss not to mention that sales are A LOT more time-consuming, expensive, and harder to close without marketing. As stated, marketing will “prime the pump” for sales.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but for several years in my engineering career I used to work in the centrifugal pumping industry so this figure of speech is very familiar to me. However, I understand it may not be for most of the readers so here is a short post I found online to explain what priming is and the importance. There is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel by typing my explanation of it all here— my time is better spent marketing my business 😉.

Note: There might be typos in this post. Autocorrect on phones can be such a gem 🙄

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