Paul McAfee Launches Marketing Plan Audit to Increase Marketing Effectiveness and Sales Results

(PRWEB) March 17, 2004

In response to companies’ urgent tactical needs to increase sales and control costs, Paul McAfee (dba paulmcafee.com) today introduced the Marketing Plan Audit. A marketing consulting firm with offices in Buffalo, New York, and Israel, paulmcafee.com offers a tested process to improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales support activities, while tightly controlling expenses.

“We find that companies are struggling to increase sales revenues at the same time they often have to reduce marketing costs,” explains Paul McAfee, founder of paulmcafee.com. “Particularly in emerging growth and turnaround situations – where timing is critical and budgets are tight – marketing and sales expenses must deliver tangible results quickly,” McAfee said. “Often, it is difficult for a company’s executive team to find real opportunities for improvement without an external assessment.”

Finding new growth opportunities from within the company is like trying to find a typographical error on a letter you have written and read several times. In the letter, you are blinded to the typos because you are so familiar with the contents. In a business, the executive team may have difficulty finding ways to improve marketing effectiveness – and save money – due to this same type of over familiarity.

The Marketing Plan Audit Process

To become a customer for a business product or service, a prospect must go through six Behavior Steps. The paulmcafee.com team breaks marketing and sales support activities down into these six stages: Awareness > Interest > Intent > Trial > Purchase > Retention.

The team works with the client’s Marketing, Sales, and Business Development teams to optimize current expense allocations to drive the results they need to achieve. Then the team helps decide how to realign these expenses to get prospects to move through the six behavior stages to become – and remain – the client’s customers. In some cases, the client company asks McAfee's team to stay following the audit to help implement the client’s new marketing and sales support strategies.

The benefits of conducting the marketing plan audit include understanding how the marketing budget is being used – where it is working – and where it is ineffective. The client also will decide if the existing marketing investment can deliver the revenue growth results needed, then realign expenses – or cut expenses if needed – to improve results.

“This audit process scales nicely from very small startup businesses to large, mature businesses,” McAfee pointed out. “For very young startups, we use these principles to build a marketing and sales strategy, ensuring that limited marketing expense budgets are used to gain maximum revenue results. For larger companies, we use the audit process to improve the financial impact of marketing and sales support expense,” he added.

McAfee's services include strategic sales and marketing planning and implementation; market research and analysis; public and investor relations management; marketing communications; and marketing and sales executive recruiting. Paul McAfee has current clients in Western New York, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

McAfee sets aside 20% of his consulting time to provide pro bono support to startups emerging from three Western New York universities; the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is pro bono Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Rochester's Office of Technology Transfer.

For more information, visit McAfee's eXubrio, LLC, web site at http://www.exubrio.com.

To read and download the presentation on the marketing plan audit, visit http://www.eXubrio.com/services/solutions/audit/

To read and download free white papers on public relations, search engine optimization, and value propositions, visit http://www.exubrio.com/services/white_papers/

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Media contact:

Paul McAfee                    

Buffalo, NY, USA