It's surprising how many marketing managers overlook the most obvious causes of poorly-performing marketing and sales programs.

Follow these eight rules and you can avoid the most common problems that beset marketing programs today.

• If You Can’t Sell Your 10 Best Prospects Over
The Phone, You Don’t Have a Business

Forget about “branding,” focus groups and fancy logos: Take your best available mailing list of prospects and call the 10 best of these. If your best persuasive abilities can’t convince them to buy your company’s product, something’s wrong. Advertising will never save a product nobody wants.

• Do You Suffer From “Brochure Paralysis?”

If you can’t get a brochure produced in two weeks, you’ve got a problem. Beyond two weeks, you’re losing business and your entire marketing effort has ground to a halt—it happens every time. Set a deadline. Go from color to black and white; xerox if you have to—but get your brochure out on the street! If you can’t sell your best 10 prospects with a draft of your brochure, you won’t sell them with the fancy one you’re waiting on, either.

• Where’s Your Phone Number?

Tack your company’s brochure to a wall and start walking backwards. If you can’t read your company’s phone number on it from 10 feet, your prospect won’t see it at arms’ length. Put your company’s phone number, address, URL, and how-to-buy info on every ad, mailing, brochure, and sales letter you send out. And don’t hold back—give your prospect all the benefits and information he needs to buy your product. No ad copy is ever too long if it tells your product’s story and sells your product.

• If You Can’t Send Out Your Brochure The Same
Day, You’ll Never Fill The Order

Sales information must be sent out in response to an inquiry the very same day as received—period. If it’s not happening for you now, see that it does. Meanwhile, e-mail a one-page .PDF sales sheet to the prospect within two hours of his call—you’ll get his attention. And if you can’t tell your story on a one-page sheet, you don’t have a business, either.

• Your Best Market May Not Be The One
You're In Now

Most huge companies that once were start-ups aren’t now in the same businesses or markets in which they originally began. Most transformed themselves overnight when faced with imminent failure. Mix it up: Run a lead-generating ad in a targeted publication. Try a direct mail test. Push private-label deals with big companies. Market your product “in the box” with someone else’s. Like any other investment, sales and marketing expenses work best when they are diversified.

• Why the Hell Didn’t the Mailing Go Out?

It’s a fact: Delays kill marketing execution, and poor execution kills sales. Take no prisoners when it comes to delays in marketing execution. Don’t allow petty excuses to bleed your company. Set firm deadlines for mailings, from idea to lettershop, magazine, or sales force: Seven days for critical items and 14 days for everything else.

• Too Many Eyes Can Kill Your Company

Don’t run marketing copy and ideas past 27 different people. There are just three people who should review all marketing copy and materials in your company: You, your sales manager, and your best current customer.

• “Creative” People Will Hose You Every Time

Beware the man in the $75 haircut who says he has the magic bullet for your advertising campaign. Advertising isn’t rocket science. If you have a good product and a willing prospect, the rest is smart execution, follow-through, and common sense.

(excerpted from The Marketing Manager's Handbook, published by Internet Media, 2003)