Analyzing your management and control

Control is sometimes hard to achieve in marketing. Some businesses don’t
really know what’s going on in their marketing because so many marketing
activities can occur and customers can be so widespread and difficult to
track. For these reasons, many companies waste time and money on their
marketing and don’t even realize it.
Writing everything down
One of the first things you should do to control your marketing is document
and record every action and expense. Keep good records and make careful lists.
This concept may sound obvious, but keeping track of your marketing can be
difficult to do. For example, my firm sells training materials and publications
to companies directly for use in their training programs. We track our direct
contacts with clients and know who buys and uses what. Or do we? We also
work with multiple distributors and publishers who may sell our publications
to companies, sometimes without our knowledge. And to make the situation
more complicated, we also sell publications to consultants who then sell
trainings based on our publications to companies. So a company can pur-
chase one of our products in many ways.