Measure THAT

One of the secrets of the Yellow Pages was that the phone company would give you a second line when you bought a big ad.

Within days of the book coming out, you'd see and hear the phone ring. And you knew which phone it was. So when the time came to renew your Yellow Pages ad, all the sales rep had to do was glance over at the phone on the wall and the prospect would imagine that phone no longer ringing...

Aaron writes in and asks, why is it so easy for a client to spend a fortune on a brochure and to spend hours agonizing over it, and so hard for them to invest in an end to permission marketing/ideavirus system?

The answer is the same: measure this, measure that.

Once the number is on the wall, in marker, or in phone calls or dollar bills, the investment will follow.

Example: Google adwords. The price of adwords keeps going up because the cost per click pricing model forces clients to measure. As soon as they measure something and see it is working, they want more. Magazine ads don't have that effect, so companies rarely bid up the price.

Example: Indie musicians at cdbaby. They tour to make a living, and they obsessively track which gigs translate into record sales. As a result, they go back to the places and the types of venues that work, and stop going to the others.

So, my best advice is not to argue with the client about building a big kickass system. Instead, it's to argue with them about measuring. Once they start measuring, they'll be begging you for the big system.