I turned forty today. I’m happy about it, too. It doesn’t really feel like forty quite yet, but I’ve done it! I have lived long enough to have some well-earned gray hair, and a good amount of wisdom that comes with it. For such a young guy, of course.

My forty years have come with a lot of lessons. Having spent well over half of those years as a marketing professional and business owner, I’ve learned a lot about marketing. I’ve shared large volumes of my experiences here on the Internet, and I feel great to say that I’ve helped a lot of people with that experience.

One of the things I learned about marketing is the value of brevity. Keep it short. Keep it easy. Don’t get too confusing with all of your wordiness. I learned it, and then I threw it out the window for the purpose of this blog. Brevity matters when you are selling something, but I am not. If you can embrace some blatant verbosity today, I’ll reward you with some valuable real life marketing lessons.

I spoke with a friend recently who said that his target market is “everybody”. He didn’t just say it, but he actually meant it, and even defended it. What’s astonishing to me is that he actually fancies himself an Internet marketing professional.

Now, I’m not calling my friend an idiot. There are a lot of great rocket scientists, school teachers, surgeons, firemen, and others who do not understand marketing. We cannot all know everything, and the fine details of marketing are certainly not something everybody wants or needs to understand.

My friend in the business of building websites, but this applies to any company, of any size, in any industry.

His belief was that since “anybody” may need a website, that he didn’t want to miss any of them by segmenting his market. In his mind, I guess he just didn’t want to leave anybody out. So, he is running Google ads directed at a massive audience.

Think about paper clips for a moment. They are about the most basic thing you will find in your desk drawer. When you consider your marketing, try to imagine selling paper clips. You probably do not think much about what brand you are buying when you need to replenish your paper clip supply. This is likely true of your product or service, too. Unless people have a good reason to remember you, it will be a lot harder to grow your paper clip market share and to become more prosperous.

If you challenged multiple companies with a truckload of paper clips to sell, somebody would sell out sooner than the rest. One would almost surely hit their stride and empty that truckload of paper clips before the others, and there must be a reason.

Shoppers lie. It happens all the time that they say they want one thing, but the truth is actually quite different. This happens because most shoppers feel a bit insecure about their purchases. Just picture yourself walking into an auto dealership to understand this better. You probably make up reasons to say “no” before you even drive on the lot. It is how consumers “protect themselves”, and it is rooted in cynicism. People want to buy things on their terms, and not the seller’s terms, and if that means they have to lie, they will often lie.

I am not going to call everybody a liar. No, I am not going to do that. What I will say is that during the purchase process, there are often things which are not exactly as they seem. This begins in the very earliest steps to a purchase, and it is the marketer’s job to overcome those smokescreens. We do this in many ways, including fact-finding about our market to better understand the ideal customer and how to meet their objectives. We perform careful propensity modeling to determine exactly who to target. Then we create a strong call-to-action to entice customers to take action now, before they can dream up another lie to help excuse themselves from committing to the sale/purchase.

It should not be surprising that much of this process is made far more difficult by trying to market to the wrong people. A lot of marketing efforts miss the target miserably by skipping the research and trying to sell to people who are only marginally interested in the offering.

Turning away business from a customer with a fist full of money and a desire to buy what you sell may seem like a bad business tactic. For many people, turning away a customer is viewed as a tragedy, but in many cases it can produce great benefit. In fact, there are many instances where this tactic can be extremely profitable. I know, it sounds crazy, but let me explain. First, I want to be clear that this is a tactic versus strategy, so don’t start trying to make a bunch of money turning people away just yet.

Examine, for a moment, a couple of reasons it can be important to turn away business, and how it may benefit your business to do so. Face it, not all customers are great customers. There are bad customers in every business … yes, I said every business. Even if you own a coin operated vending machine company and never have to face the customer, there is such a thing as a bad one. There are ways to turn away business that are tactful and useful, and sometime we just have to learn when it is right to say “no” to the customer.