Poor Alex Bogusky. America's hottest adman must be thinking, What have I done wrong? Fresh from nursing his wounds after a vicious encounter with Gawker (which he deserved), the Crispin Porter + Bogusky chief is being pilloried in the blogosphere for writing a book that is only 150 pages long. In large type.

Everyone in business should understand how financial success is measured and how they, individually, make an impact.

A Fortune 100 company we work with held a two-day class recently to teach various mid-level managers the foundational elements of finance. The class focused on how to read financial statements and then, using their own public GAAP 10K statements, how to read, analyze and understand the story that their numbers are telling.

Because the participants all came from one division of the company (and because the company is so big), we wanted to include data that has a "line of sight" to the participants, that is, data that relates to what they do — or at the very least, is about their unit. That data also is available publicly in the 10K.

We were told, however, that we were not to include any of that public data in the training manual, and furthermore not to share the information verbally with the participants. Crazy as it sounds, they did not want public data shared in the class.

Most leaders we work with enthusiastically agree with our approach to use their own data to ensure that their employees, managers and leaders have an opportunity to learn not only the basics of finance, but also how their particular company and the divisions measure success: their key numbers, their statements, their results. Yes, we can teach the basics of a generic income statement or balance sheet, but the learning really hits home when employees have an opportunity to apply the concepts to their own company. With their own information, they can understand how their decisions impact the income statement, see how cash is being used with the cash flow statement, know where to focus to meet the company's financial goals, and understand the meaning of the most recent financial results. (In a private company the difficulty is clear, and we work with those companies to find a solution that keeps information confidential but provides a learning opportunity.)

In the case of the Fortune 100 company above, we held the class without the division's data, using only the company-wide data and financials. The feedback we received was positive, but, not surprisingly, the comments indicated that we should have included information about the participants' division, as that would have made the program more relevant to how they can focus on the company's success.

To truly have an impact, employees, managers and leaders need to both understand financial data and have access to the real numbers that their performance effects.

How open is your company with its financial data? Do you think it should be more or less open?

Merck was sent back to the drawing board on its new Zetia-Lipitor combo drug when the FDA refused to accept its application. That's an unheard of gaffe for a Big Pharma firm. Merck slipped the news into its 10-Q filing with the SEC.

It could just be posturing, but Vivendi SA says it is in no hurry to sell its 20 percent stake in NBC Universal, which would trigger a $30 billion deal for Comcast to become majority owner of the media giant. There will be interesting fall-out if the proposed transaction does not occur.

Cisco is broadening its footprint with a major move into the cloud computing space. The company has formed a far-reaching partnership with EMC -- a joint venture in which VMware, a majority owned subsidiary of EMC, will also play a large role. Called "Acadia," the new entity is marketing vBlock infrastructure packages, aka "vBlocks."

In 2004, James Surowiecki wrote The Wisdom of Crowds to describe the way that groups can aggregate information and use it to make decisions more effectively than an individual. The example often cited was that a crowd was able to guess the weight of a slaughtered ox more effectively than individual experts, when the crowd’s guesses were averaged together. However, not all small businesses need an ‘intelligent crowd.’ Sometimes what's needed is the brute force of a large group of people, all working on an uncomplicated, repetitive task that humans can do but computers can’t. Amazon, the folks who bring you books and other things via their online site, created a service called “Mechanical Turk” that allows people to create such “Human Intelligence Tasks”, and parcel out the actions to any workers that show up to do the task. Users have to take a ‘test’ to prove that they can do the work, and then they work on as many or as few assignments as they want to. One challenge, however, is that the quality of individual workers can vary, and you, the job creator, are responsible for your own quality control. Enter CrowdFlower.com Luke Biewald, Founder and CEO, told me that in a previous role, he occasionally needed a bunch of people to quickly check local results for search engine Powerset (now part of Microsoft’s Bing team), but he couldn’t just hire and fire them overnight. He started using Mechanical Turk to parcel out tasks, but found the quality of the results would vary depending on who did the tasks. Luke and his partners made a decision to create Crowdflower. Their website redundantly assigns tasks to different workers. They then test the results. If multiple workers agree on a result, it gives a higher degree of confidence about the quality of the work. Crowdflower works “on top of” sites like Mechanical Turk, even splitting work across different crowd sourcing sites. Why farm out this kind of work? Luke described a wedding photography company that assigns a task of looking at pictures, labeling them (Is the Bride in this photo?), and then asks “does this seem like a good photo that someone would want?” The photographer doesn’t have to look through a bunch of pictures to judge brightness, or focus, and he also gets a result “bride and groom in the photo.” Christian Wiklund Founder & CEO Skout, Inc. (warning- dating site, not all images are appropriate for a business office), a mobile-focused location-based dating site said “One thing that we have to do is content moderation – making sure there’s no copyrighted or explicit material on our site. We used to do this manually, but as we’re growing, we either have to hire more people in our operations team, or outsource this in some way. Crowdflower provided a cheap alternative. All our content uploads go to Crowdflower, and we get back an ‘approved’ or ‘not approved’ message. This works out really well for us. We did side by side manual approval to Crowdflower’s work force, and they were basically equivalent.This kind of work has to be done by people, and this solution is saving us money and time." Crowdflower marks up 33% on top of the cost of the crowdsourcing sites. The company recently took a $1MM angel funding round. How could you use a ‘crowd’ to solve your problems? Give some feedback below.

About 24 percent of Insignia Systems' entire quarterly expenses went on its legal fight against News America Marketing's alleged monopoly over supermarket advertising.

AT&T Wireless has filed suit against Verizon over the latter's latest ad campaign. That campaign, which claims Verizon has five times more U.S. 3G wireless network coverage than AT&T, shows two maps of the United States side by side, one with each company's coverage. The map purporting to show AT&T's 3G coverage has large areas of white space, implying a lack of overall coverage in those areas, AT&T said.

Most business owners would agree that maintaining or increasing sales is a vital need for their business. It's a common misconception, but many businesses tend to think of increasing sales only when things get slow. There are, however, many other reasons to increase revenue aside from simply compensating for a sluggish economy or seasonal downturns. Growth objectives and profit goals will typically require increased revenue which must come from increased sales. But whatever your motivation, the challenge lies in how to make it happen effectively and strategically — and quickly!

Strategic Spaghetti Slinging

A business owner once remarked to a colleague that he'd just engaged in some marketing, hoping to boost sales. He told his colleague that what he had done was send postcards to names on a rented list. The colleague then remarked, “Actually, what you did was commit a random act of lead generation.” In other words, his effort to generate sales did not actually constitute marketing, which E-Myth defines as the research and analysis of customers and the formulation of strategies and tactics that will generate leads. Instead, the business owner simply tried out a lead generation tactic that may or may not have resulted in some leads which may or may not have been converted to new customers.

There is a term in advertising spaghetti marketing used to describe the random spending of marketing dollars in an unorganized, unplanned way. The slang term is derived from cooking spaghetti where one will "throw spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks," and although this method may result in some sales, the problem inherent in this approach is that no business has a bottomless pot of spaghetti! The effectiveness of this random, trial-and-error method is highly questionable, both in terms of cost and actual sales generated. A small business owner is limited as to how many unsuccessful sales tactics can be attempted.

Have a Plan and Work it

So what is the answer? The reality is that marketing and sales are probably as much an art as a science. This means that some well-planned strategies and tactics may not be as successful as expected. So other methods and tactics need to be tried, often simultaneously, in order to find the methods and tactics that result in sales. This could be seen as strategic “spaghetti slinging” — a planned and strategic effort to generate sales with the expectation that not everything may work as planned. Yet the need for a strategic marketing plan still exists. The beauty of this approach is that it minimizes both risk and cost while maximizing potential for success.

Getting Them to Buy

Although there are probably hundreds of lead generating tactics, or activities, for every business and every industry, we have provided a few that have been proven to work — and will again:

• Promote and host a live seminar or virtual webinar. If you are willing to speak before an audience, you can use this approach to position your business as a trusted resource and yourself as an authority in your particular field. The key with a seminar is to not “sell” your business, service, or product, but to provide valuable information for your customers and prospective customers. The result will be appreciative participants, increased awareness and favorable perceptions of your business, and potential sales as a result. One of our clients initially used this approach to provide much needed education for her clients and prospective clients who attended her seminar. Her first event was not only highly successful and well received, but she obtained a number of unsolicited requests for her services as a result!
• Reach out and re-connect. Many small businesses have a customer base that can provide a profitable source of either repeat business or referrals for qualified leads. An E-Myth client recently took a print-out of his client database and conducted a two-week long phone calling campaign. His stated purpose was to simply check in with his previous customers, re-acquaint himself, and ask how they were doing. This simple act of targeted networking netted him a dozen requests for quotes on new business and quite a few purchase orders.
• Make your customers VIPs. Almost any business type can create an incentive program that encourages more business. One business we know of created a VIP club for customers that combines discount incentives with promoting referrals. Select customers were invited to become “VIP” members and given an initial, one-time discount on their next purchase. They were also given custom cards printed with the customer’s name to be given to friends, family and acquaintances who might come to the store. The cards served to identify the new customers as referrals and which VIP customer had made the referral. The VIP member received additional incentives with every referral who made purchases and the new customers were offered a VIP membership. The results were both immediate and ongoing!

There Must Be a Method to the Tactics

The real key to generating more sales is to continually focus on your customer’s needs, wants, and desires — and to always look for new and different ways to make your product offering meet your customer's where they are. It may be a cliché, but this is where “thinking outside the box” is truly a benefit.

How well you know your most probable customers — your target market — can make or break your sales efforts. And that's why marketing is so important. A healthy amount of research and planning at the beginning of your sales cycle will save you time, money and headaches  - and increase your potential for success.

Sun Tzu, a brilliant Chinese General, military strategist and author of The Art of War, is often quoted as saying: "Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." We might extend that to marketing: Know thy self, know thy market. A thousand lead generation activities, a thousand sales.

Further Reading

The Art of Marketing
Creating a Sensory Experience
Advertising is Not Marketing

I advise companies on their pricing strategies, and I'm surprised how often I hear the same flawed piece of conventional wisdom. Many executives and Wall Street analysts continue to think that a high profit margin signifies good pricing. It's hard not to see that big differential between revenue and costs as a signal that you've got pricing nailed. But if that's right, how do you explain Wal-Mart — with its anemic 3.3% net margin — ranking number 2 in the Fortune 500?

If your profit margin isn't a good gauge of pricing effectiveness, what is? Simple: Just ask, is our profit increasing? Bear with me while I walk through a few scenarios. There's a little arithmetic, but you'll be surprised by what it reveals.

Consider a rose shop with fixed costs of $300 and variable costs of 80 cents per rose sold. At a $2 price, 500 flowers are sold. This results in revenue of $1,000. With costs of $700 [$300 + (500 x $0.80)], profit is $300 and the profit margin is 30%.

Now, consider these scenarios in which the shop lowers its margins, but actually increases its profits:

If rose prices are dropped to $1.50, suppose that 1,000 flowers are sold. Revenue is $1,500 ($1.50 x 1,000) and costs are $1,100 [$300 + (1000 x $0.80). The result is a profit of $400, but the profit margin drops to 26.7%. What would the owner prefer, a 30% profit margin or an extra $100 in profits?

Returning to the original scenario ($2 price, 500 sold), suppose the flower stand offers a coupon (or negotiates a volume purchase) that results in an extra 1,000 roses being sold at 90 cents each. By using a pricing tactic to generate new sales, profits increase to $400 but the profit margin drops to 21%.

A high operating margin does not reflect pricing excellence. In fact, it usually reveals that you're missing growth opportunities. The next time that your company is evaluating a new pricing initiative, focus on what counts the most: will we make more profit?

Rafi Mohammed, PhD, is a pricing strategy consultant and author of The Art of Pricing and the forthcoming The 1% Windfall (March 2010). His website is pricingforprofit.com