If your company is struggling with increased competition or facing a significant decline in sales there is a way to get back control.

For most companies the answer is sitting right in front of them. These are marketing assets that already exist within the company. Assets the companies can readily convert into increased sales and profits. When it comes to business growth, many local businesses are too close to the forest to see the trees.

That’s where hiring an outside marketing firm can help. But you must be careful. Seeking expertise that might not exist within your company carries dangers.

We want area businesses to know there are more ways to grow than ad agents and high-priced out of area consultants will let on. And want you to know what to look for when considering hiring outside help.

Five Important Qualifications

Make sure any company you are considering working with meets these high standards:

1) Guarantees an increase in sales or there’s no charge for their services.

Awards, accolades, effort and promises mean nothing. What your bottom line needs is an increase in sales. More clients and customers, more referrals and increased client retention…with less effort required of you. You need a performance-based company that invests in your success as much as in their own.

2) Guarantees to work at their expense until they increase your sales beyond any fees they charge.

Avoid companies that nickel and dime you with each and every effort they ‘expend’ in your behalf. Those types of agencies are plentiful. Heck, annyone who’s ever read Hans Christian Andersen’s story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” knows swindlers and con men existed even back before the 1800’s.

The modern day con men put on great aires too, and in the end do nothing but steal from people. They charge for supposed effort when they should be producing real, concrete results. Sure, Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was just a story about an unwitting Emperor and unscrupolous tailors.

Today, the cons are more elaborate. And their game is no fairy tale told for Children. It’s real life. And it can mean the difference between your company continuing prosperously or you getting robbed blind.

3) Provides a delivery date guarantee of a complete marketing plan exclusive for your company — or there’s no charge for their marketing plans.

The last thing you want is to get strung along for days or weeks while their clock (and billings) keep ticking.

4) Refuses to accept ‘kickbacks’ or concealed payments from media sources for talking clients into buying more advertising.

How can a company truly offer unbiased advice when they are openly accepting ‘kickbacks’ from media sources? In truth, they can’t. Their advice tends to resemble something Abraham Maslow said, ‘If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.’ The same is true of companies that accept kickbacks on ads. They claim every marketing opportunity requires advertising. It doesn’t.

We can show you easy ways to increase sales and referrals without spending more on ads and with far less hassles than you can expect from traditional ad agencies. And since we are local we can offer more personalized services than big-name agencies can or are willing to offer.

5) Are independent professionals, not part of a franchise.

Every franchise charges at minimum an annual franchise fee against their consultants. That doesn’t take into consideration the per-dollar fee charged against its members for each client they accept. Why does this matter? Because franchised consulting and benchmarking companies MUST pass the fees on to their clients, regardless of result produced for clients. This is why they cannot “risk” offering a guarantee on their services.

Instead, their first concern is earning back or covering their front-end franchise fees. Getting a positive return on investment of their client’s marketing dollars is a secondary or tertiary concern [if it is a concern at all to them].

Instead their focus is getting paid for effort, not results. We don’t work that way.

So what can we do for you?

• Increase the quality and quantity of leads and repeat purchases
• Improve response rate of existing marketing communications
• Increase the average value and revenue from existing clients and customers
• Develop systematic strategic alliances with vendors, peers, and other referral sources
• Make smart use of internet marketing
• Develop strong community relations
• Use direct marketing effectively and predictably

Test us and if we don’t increase sales and outsell what you are now using you owe us nothing — so you risk nothing. Our objective is making a difference for you. Not taking money for effort. So what do we require in our clients?

Our ideal clients are smart. Capable. And unfortunately tend to be very busy. Few have the free time for “thinking” about how to improve their business. Instead they are held back by constant ‘fires’ and meeting after meeting.

So we help improve their businesses and expand their range of possibilities in ways they might not have the time to implement on their own.

For example, every established business has underutilized resources and hidden assets. When companies leverage these assets in ways ‘traditional’ marketing completely overlooks, those assets can produce significant revenue and profit increases. By optimizing these marketing assets that already exist in the company, a company can increase business 25% to 100% or more without spending more money on ads.

Why Companies Fail To Reach Their True Potential

Uncovering these assets requires considerable amount of time dedicated exclusively to evaluating current and past marketing efforts.

Add the need to analyze overlooked areas of marketing and trends currently affecting your industry and it’s easy to see why few companies ever undertake the task internally. They just don’t have time or staff readily available to dedicate to profiting from these assets.

Besides these challenges there is one other problem that keeps businesses from growing to their full potential. This is an area most companies consider taboo to even speak of. So it gets kicked under the rug and people pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

That area is catering to the status quo within a company. It’s called ‘not bucking the system’.

No one wants to add more work for themselves. And lets face it. Right now a lot of employees feel good jobs are scarce. So instead of doing anything they imagine might risk putting their heads on the chopping block in any way, they refuse to do or say anything they imagine might leave them vulnerable to the next cut — even if they know the potential for growth is there.

The company misses opportunities because of this reticence.

That’s where SMBC comes in.

We Do The Work For Our Clients

We conduct a series of business growth analyses with business owners covering eight specific areas of marketing. From these interviews we augment the marketing companies are already using, as well as uncover areas of marketing they may have overlooked until now.

Whether a company is seeking more customers, more money per transaction, more income streams, more repeat sales, or some other marketing objective… optimizing the marketing assets that already exist within the business is always more efficient and prudent than spending more money on advertising.

The process does not require increasing the workload of business owners either.

That’s because at Santa Maria Business Consultants we do all of the research and the work of uncovering these hidden assets for our clients…so clients can spend their time focusing on what they do best – running their companies without guesswork.

Though we are based out of Santa Maria, business owners and professionals in more than seven countries have benefited from our founder’s advice. His unique business growth strategies have increased client sales by as much as 6,000% in as little as 27 days. Most companies can expect to realistically see a two to three time increase in sales in as little as 90 to 180 days. In some cases it may take 12 to 18 months to implement each of the strategies we uncover for clients.

Our Experience

By working with Santa Maria Business Consultants your company will benefit from proven methods of marketing.

Our founder’s unique perspective and insights on marketing gives us the ability to see overlooked opportunities and create hybrid marketing approaches that cannot be achieved from working in only one or two industries alone.

Here are a few of our founder’s marketing articles featured On Ezine Articles you might find of use for your company.