Times When Your Marketing Bombed

My very first sales job was selling fire alarms in people's homes. Four months of two appointments a day. No sales at all. I was indescribably terrible at it.

My first two years of advertising (my retail store)also produced almost no results. After a few months of terrible results, I started studying direct response advertising.....read lots of books on copywriting, studied magazine advertising that repeated for more than a year (at the local library). It slowly turned around to where my ads were pulling 20-40 times their cost. This is before we advertised online.

As a seasoned salesperson, I always made money...except once. I had a guy the factory (who made the vacuums I sold) hired show us all how it was done. All of us distributors were experienced business people. We should have known better.

The entire country (including me) went from paying a commission, to a straight salary. And we started offering a room of carpet steam cleaned for free as the incentive for the prospect to let us come out. Bad incentive. Lots of wasted time, and bad appointments.

My personal closing percentage went from about 80% to about 15%. And the 6 or 8 "sales" people I paid to "sell"...didn't make a single sale for 4 months. Every week, these guys were getting good pay, and no money was coming in, except my own personal sales.

I started that year with a successful business, $100,000 in the bank, and an office. After 4 months, all the money was gone...wasted on non performing people and office staff.

This is the only time as an adult...an experienced sales guy..that I really lost money. And it's the only time I partially blame it on someone else. I followed someone else's untested idea, and lost big. Again, I should have known better.

After 4 months, I fired the "help", and just went out in the field and sold the way I always did. It took me a few months to get back the money I lost. But the lesson stuck.

I was one of maybe 30 distributors that followed the same idea, and we all lost money. It almost killed the company as well. Live and learn.

Oh Gosh? The failures...

Pull up a chair...

Lemme set the tone.

The year is 2002. I'm in a small rural community. The money spenders are "Old" money, like Methuselah old. Land owners, Grove owners, Cattle owners.

Well, the local bank, which started back when the Pony Express was around, gets robbed.

Feds come in. State comes in. City and County come in. All doin their investigating.

Local paper splashes headline across their front page,"150-Year Old Bank Robbed!"

The town is in an uproar and said bank starts getting one account after another closing.

Well, me bein who I am, I get this hair brain idea to create a direct response flyer selling home Safes.

Headline read, "Is Your Money Really Safe In A Bank?"

Had a real nice picture of a Sentry Safe right underneath the headline. Below that was the pitch, the price, and my phone number.

Mailed that flyer out. Within two-three days I'm getting calls from interested and worried people.

I'm thinkin, Wham! I just hit the motherload.

Ran that flyer campaign for about a month.

Zero, Nada, not a single sale.

Later I discovered that an employee at the local hardware store received one of my flyers. They turned it over to their employer.

Turns out local hardware store ordered 10 pallets of, you guessed it, Sentry Safes that looked identical to the picture on my flyer.

And yes, they sold everyone of those money chests.

Moral of my story, there are others who will use your own marketing to profit from your efforts.

Chinchilla

It was back in 2011, I succeded making my forex and trading web blog a little cash cow.
At that time, I studied at University and getting roughly 500 Euros monthly it was amazing.
It lasted only for 2-3 months but I was exciting.

I published a pdf about forex with my blog articles filled with top player affiliate link, the pdf became very popular among newbies but soon the forex company changed the affiliate domain link, so I lost my affiliate link on such guide.

Then the revenue went down to 10-20 euros, I sold the website after a while becuase I've found a job as system administrator.

I was one of those guys who bought a mailing list of 10,000 "business opportunity seekers" for $500. That was a real bargain - until postage and packaging was applied. It took me nearly 10 years to get a return on that from the few MLMers I managed to recruit.

Not me, but we can look at Microsoft, Nokia, and Windows Phones.

The modern version (Windows Phone 7) was introduced globally in 2010. The platform was unique, modern during its time, and its interface closely resembled Windows 8

Fast forward to 2013, Microsoft bought Nokia's mobile phone division essentially making Microsoft a mobile phone manufacturer.

Microsoft released three subsequent versions - the aforementioned WP7, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1, and finally Windows 10 Mobile. Then in 2017, it was announced that Microsoft would eventually be closed due to poor market penetration and lack of interest from app developers.

Microsoft heavily marketed the platform, even making fun of Siri when the Redmon-based company released their own virtual assistant named Cortana.

But it failed.