Brian Tracy lists Seven Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, Packaging, Position, People.

Today I’m going to talk about that very physical aspect of marketing: Place. Where are you marketing from?

Two keys to location are:

Research in Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, have just unveiled their brand-new, poke-Apple’s-iphone, touch-screen, slide-out keyboard Torch. Their profits were down. They were losing their market share. Something had to be done.

It’ll be interesting to watch the whole show unfold, won’t it?

According to Brian Tracy, there are seven issues that affect profits. They are:

1. The number of prospects that marketing attracts.
2. How many prospects are converted to customers.
3. The number of sales made.
4. How big the sales are.
5. How much it is costing to make a sale.
6. The profit margin on each sale.
7. How often customers buy again.

As a FocalPoint Business Coach these are all numbers you can ask your client to produce when you start to work with them.

Then there’s two lines of attack for you to take.

Ask, “Which of these numbers has the biggest impact on your profits?”

Or, look for the number that is the lowest producing in that list of seven and work with it  and ask:

“What can you do to make that number better?”

At this point the two of you can start to build a plan of attack, a strategy with goals and objectives, that will lead to improvement.

What next?

I suggest you set up another review session with the client. Go over those seven profit affecting issues again. Chances are the change of one profit point will have an effect on all of them. Now there’ll be a new dud at the bottom of the pile: time to start a new plan of attack.

By helping your client to develop a system where they are continually monitoring these profit issues, they will continually see results.

In many ways, seven as a matter of fact, this an easy fix – as Brian says, improving any one of these will improve profits, improving more than one will improve profits significantly.