Making The Case

I think I posted this spreadsheet on my blog seven or eight years ago ... the spreadsheet allows one to craft different scenarios.

Now, you're a smart person ... you've paid attention to what I've been talking about for the past six months, and you agree ... customer acquisition is the path to the future.

And yet, when you broach the subject with Sr. Management, they tell you to crawl back into your cave and figure out if Cyber Monday is more profitable with 40% off plus paid shipping or 30% off plus free shipping.

So run yourself a scenario.

Let's say this business increases new+reactivated buyers by 20%. What happens?

In five years, a $149,000,000 business becomes a $178,000,000 business.

Ask your leadership team which business they would prefer to manage?

The vendor/pundit community demanded that you be omnichannel or your business model was dead. Nordstrom / Macy's / Wal-Mart and others are proving the opposite ... focusing on channels is wrong. Catalogers know this, too. Catalogers spent the past decade integrating the entire experience, only to be left with a 65 year old customer base that likes pre-retirement merchandise ... the co-ops over-optimized this process and are now dying as well, leaving the catalog industry with significant struggles.

It's time to focus on the two things that matter.

1. Merchandise Productivity.
2. Customer Acquisition.

Tomorrow, I will begin a four week series focusing on rebuilding your marketing team to focus on customer acquisition and merchandise productivity. You will disagree with just about everything I say, because that's just the way things work. That's ok. Please go back to a simple question, when you disagree with me.

• What did a decade of doing what consultants, boutique agencies, co-ops, Google, Facebook, trade journals / trade journalists, and vendors told you to do get you? How did their strategies work, in terms of growing your business?