Magic answers

In my business career, I’ve only had two “wow” marketing success stories.  One became one of the core concepts that has influenced this business for close to two decades.  The second proved to be far more situational and transient but led me to Washington D.C.

In the first, through family friends, I read the book Breaking the No Barrier: The Billion Dollar Battle Plan Battle Plan for Getting to Yes by the late Walt Hailey.  He had developed a consulting practice primarily serving dentists, but his message — about how the business supply chain works and how you can effectively plug your organization into that chain — caught the core of the relationship-driven feature profiles which continue to drive most of our business revenue.  When I first tried the techniques in practice in 1996, results were astounding:  We sold more advertising, more rapidly, than we had ever before.  (The technique proved to be so successful that other publishers simultaneously used — and abused it — to such an extent that it is now overworked and largely ineffective unless combined with deep respect and relationship-focused practices.)

In the second, the U.S. government announced a “non-preference Visa lottery”.  The rules the first year were so strange they invited some creativity.  The first 10,000 applications received at the Brentwood postal station in Washington D.C. after midnight on the lottery day would get a Green Card.  You could enter as many times as you liked, but you could only use regular first class postage — but you didn’t actually have to sign the documentation.  My brainwave:  I would collect orders over the phone, fly to Washington, and dump the visa applications in the mail at the postal station through the day before the deadline, with the hope that some might reach the back end exactly at midnight and be selected.

The Canadian media loved the story, especially when an enterprising reporter in Edmonton called the U.S. embassy in Ottawa and received confirmation from a consular official that my idea, indeed, was legitimate.  My phone rang off the hook.  I wasn’t the only one with the idea.  The U.S. postal service set a record for mail transacted at a single postal station.  (And, yes, it worked as I received a Green Card a couple of years later.)

These stories only have limited relationship and copying value.  Obviously the odd visa program rules aren’t in place any more but they did spawn some really creative and even scammy stuff among a variety of consultants and online services.  The supply-chain relationship technique has more lasting value and is one approach I recommend you consider using, especially with business-to-business clients, but if you apply it in a manipulative and cynical manner you will undoubtedly fail (I can attest to several competitors who ‘worked the same system’ and are no longer in business, even though for a time they looked like they would be far more successful.)

One of the most enjoyable experiences in my business career occurred when I combined Walt Hailey’s relationship techniques with a product launch in the Washington, D.C. market.  That experience cemented my relationship with the U.S. capital city area, which it remains today because The Design and Construction Network is based there, and so is the home of The Design and Construction Report.

So, you might be saying, these marketing stories don’t help my contracting business.  Well, perhaps, but that is the problem with most people looking for ideas in others’ success stories.  In themselves, they are rarely transferable but they are highly adaptable.  You take the insights from one experience and apply it to another.

(But there is one transferable approach to marketing and business success.  Within your relevant trade association, learn who your most successful peers are in another community with reasonably similar demographics and conditions to yours.  Then take a vacation (er, family business trip?) and pick brain.  Copying someone else’s non-competitive success is a whole lot more effective and probably far less expensive than trying and trying again to do things the way you’ve always done them.)

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