The Complex System: Story of an Entrepreneur

Never Give Up

Yes, we lost a monster deal. If you read my post from a few weeks ago, you know how upset I was about it. I’ve moved on, but I haven’t fully given up. In an effort to keep our company top of mind I often follow-up with prospects by sending them some type of unique gift. As you can see by the pictures below, I’ve selected a very fine bottle of sake.

And as I’ve talked about before, I believe packaging to be just as important as the product itself. So I spent a bit of time building together a handmade shipping crate (yes, i built it). I think the gift speaks for itself. Let’s see what happens.

Cracking the Marketing Nut

Of course any marketer wants to turn a dollar into more than a dollar, but the holy grail of marketing is figuring out how to scale. If you can demonstrate that spending 20 grand more on the same thing will generate 35k in return, who wouldn’t do it? I’m obsessed with this quest but it’s extremely challenging. I started about 8 months ago with consistent metrics tracking. It took several months to hammer that out and its producing data. Deep down I somewhat hoped that would be all and the answer would suddenly come, of course it didn’t. Now I take that information and make best guess decisions on how to tweak marketing. Maybe some will say it’s a perfect science, but my experience is there is some art here. My decisions are about 50% data and 50% gut. Right now, that’s the best I can do. I feel like I’m making progress. I’m definitely getting ROI, that’s not the issue. We make more than we spend, but I can’t say with any decisiveness that if we doubled the marketing spend, it would result in double the ROI. That’s the mission though.