When you engage a supplier to do work for you, generally you are engaging them because they have expertise that you do not have and it is less expensive to utilize their services than hire internally.  But how many times do you waste your time trying to do work that could be handled by your expert suppliers.  I look at our business, we are very knowledgeable about online marketing and we have the ability to consult with all our customers on various marketing and online marketing decisions.

I recently had a client call me up and he said I will gladly pay for your time, I need some help making a decision on my yellow pages ad.  He still felt that he was getting leads from his ad and wanted to have some advice as to the size of the ad he should go with and tracking opportunities.  I advised him to put in a unique toll free number in each ad (so he could track his calls through the toll free usage reports) and a unique domain in each of his ads to track those going to his ad and then typing in his URL in his ad and visiting his website.  Within 10 minutes we had a plan that would help him track the effectiveness of his yellow pages advertising.

We have another client that is a large online marketing customer and every time he is approached about an online marketing tactic he sends the opportunity my way and lets me and my team analyze it and see if it fits into his online marketing plan.  I always think, he is a smart man, he knows his time is worth a lot and he understands we have expertise knowledge that allows us to analyze these opportunities.  He concentrates on his business and we advise him on ours.

Recently, I met with a client that presented an investment opportunity to me and wanted to see if I was interested and he wanted us to put together an online marketing campaign for him.  I came out of the meeting and said I need to understand this more and spend some time reading his documentation.  Then I thought I have a great wealth advisor who I trust, I am going to send this information over to him to analyze and give me his feedback.  Sure enough within a day he was back with some great information that will help me understand this opportunity.

The theme of this blog post is your time is worth a lot and you cannot know about everything so use your experts and get the correct advise at a fraction of the time and likely the cost (of your time).

This entry was posted by John McDonald on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 at 11:10 am and is filed under Business, Sales and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.