Guest Opinion: Some advice is best ignored

The thing about bad advice is that it may take months or even years to reveal. Years ago, I worked for a Richmond printing company with an entrepreneurial owner. He had an amazing vision of the future, but a management team that either couldn’t see it or didn’t know how to make it happen.

It was clear that things weren’t going in the right direction, so he hired an expert from the industry to straighten us out. He had been running a plant for one of America’s largest printing firms. In our first meeting, he told me to get the marketing and sales strategies lined up to sell flat and carbonless forms because that is what we could produce well.

I told him he was crazy; he told me I had a bad attitude. He left a few months later and the firm eventually went out of business – victim of too many great ideas and too little ability to execute. I’m sure he later read of the company’s demise, leaned back in his chair with a self-satisfied look on his face and thought to himself, “They should have listened to me.”

The truth is we might have survived that crisis with a renewed focus on flat and carbonless forms, but it would have been short lived. Those products were going away and are all but gone today. Had we focused on producing them, we would have ended up with the proverbial “best buggy whips in town,” just without any buggy owners to sell them to.

This is a problem I have encountered again and again.

Locally, someone advised Ukrop’s that new customers would flock to stores if you told them you had Continuously Low Prices. Really? People went to Ukrop’s because they were better, not cheaper. Someone else must have told them that no one would notice if they cut back on the ingredients in their cakes. If your customers shop there because you are better, not because you are cheaper, is it a good idea to cut back on the quality of your baked goods? What happens to your brand when you do that?

Here are some recent myths I’ve heard and the flip sides:

“You’d better lay off the big salary people to save the most money.” This is only good if the folks with the big salaries didn’t do anything to earn them. If that’s the case, you’ve got bigger problems than getting through the recession. Keep your best people; they are the ones who can help you through the storm. Get rid of the ones who aren’t doing what you need them to do. Recession or no recession, keeping an employee just because they don’t cost much is a bad idea.

“There’s no point in doing any marketing right now, nobody’s buying.” Marketing drives 15 percent of short-term sales but is responsible for 85 percent of your long-term sales. If you stop marketing, it won’t matter if you survive the recession; you’re just prolonging your agony. By the way, 67 percent of what you used to spend could have gotten you better results without increasing the spend. Look at your tactics and get innovative with social media and relevant messaging, don’t stop altogether. It’s a big mistake.

“People don’t care about quality, they just want a low price.” In a word, that’s crap. There is a reason that everyone buys everything that’s out there. You just have to make sure you’ve got something that some people want and that you are selling it to the right people. Sure, there are people who don’t have a problem with shopping at Wal-Mart because they can get good prices and that’s what’s important to them. The last time I was in one though, I saw an altercation between shoppers that almost ended up in a brawl on the floor. I don’t want to trade lower prices for barroom brawls. I want something in the middle, so Target works for me. Whatever it is that you sell, figure out who wants it. Narrow your marketing to those people, make sure they know why you are different, and it’ll work.

“There is no reason to meet with sales people, you don’t have any money to spend.” Let’s dissect this statement. Yes, budgets have been cut, but unless you are already out of business, you are still spending money. Colleges are still trying to recruit students, nonprofits are still trying to raise money, and businesses still need phone systems for their customers to call in on.

I’ll agree that some of the sales people who call on me are pretty pathetic, but some know what they are talking about. Every organization is spending money. Just because we’re in a recession doesn’t mean that there aren’t better ways to spend it – ways that could deliver better results. Why in the world wouldn’t we want to meet with anyone who potentially had an idea, a product or strategy that could give us a leg up? This recession has given lazy people the perfect excuse not to get any better. Most businesses don’t do everything perfectly. I know mine doesn’t. Just because you’ve allocated money for things already doesn’t mean you absolutely have to spend it there if you find something better in the meantime.  If someone has told you not to look because you don’t have money, you’re getting bad advice.

Kate Dunn is the owner of Digital Innovations Group.