You know how when something bad happens and it really never sits well with you? It probably makes you anxious, guilty - all bad feelings? Later over time, depending on the severity of the bad thing, you can laugh, learn or avoid it altogether in the future.

Thanks to my ever-so-wise mom, I learned at an early age that if I can't let something go the only way for me to move on was to put it to paper and get it out of my head. (She gave me a new journal every year for my birthday.) In college, I even did a study on the effects of writing as a cognitive therapy.

I still have those journals as a reminder that sometimes the only way to find the right answer is to get outside of your own head.

So here's my attempt to get this out of my head and help business owners and people who set marketing strategy to get outside yours.

When the Fear of Famine Leads to Famine

Fear is a tremendously motivating force. Unfortunately, it often leads people (and businesses) to move in the wrong direction.

An NPR podcast shows how when we fear what we think will happen, we can make poor decisions that lead to that very thing happening with devastating consequences - making people go hungry, for instance - consequences that could be avoided if we just check our fear reflex.

This is an important lesson for businesses. If businesses stick with only what has worked in the past (same markets, products, messaging, channels, sales process, budget, etc, etc...) because they are afraid of going out of business in a tough economy, they are more likely to stagnate and the economy will be a bigger factor for them. The employees, partners and vendors that depend on those business will suffer. The ripple effect can be devastating, and can be avoided by investing more in the types of things that can grow your business.

We Need a Do-Over on Unsustainable Practices

Of course, this economy is not just a bad storm, its climate change.  With that comes the need have a new way to do business. Smarketing is one example of a new to do business that can set businesses up for out-of-this-world growth. Sounds great, right?

Yes, if your business can handle it. In another story from NPR that I heard on the radio, a scientist argued that both farming practices and consumer preferences have to change drastically in order for there to be enough food to feed the world in 50 years. Modern agriculture has allowed us to become highly productive and efficient on a mass scale in order to feed a population with expensive tastes; however, the problem now is that it's not sustainable. The system will burn itself out and then where will we find ourselves?

Businesses also need to make sure that if they're going to have growth, it is scalable and sustainable. Ask yourself if your leads go from 10 a week to 100 a week, what's going happen? Is your sales team going to be able to keep up using their current sales process? If not, which will cost you more: fixing that problem or letting it slide (and letting a percentage of new opportunities slide away with it)?

Your Smarketing Clock Is Ticking

Once I had kids, I understood that the only real commodity in life is time. (It took weeks to write and finally post this article!) Both NPR articles emphasized the importance of time. In the first, the results of negative fear reactions manifested literally overnight when the price of rice rose 20%. In the second, it was argued that we have only 40 years to fix the current situation or we'll be looking at a global food shortage.

How much time does your business have? What happens if you do nothing to change your current situation and how long will it take for that to happen? Will you lose customers, lose production capacity, or go out of business? Put a number to those situations. How many thousands of dollars in lost revenue does that represent? And what does that mean for you personally? Having to put your resume out there? Having to work for someone else instead of running the show?

The Smarketing Solution: Stop the Fear-Loss Cycle

Reactive decisions based on fear of loss, leading to loss and more fear - it's a vicious cycle. Put a stop to it by meeting 2012 with a solid smarketing strategy that lines up the way you market and sell to the new ways your customers want to buy.

Not ready for a one-on-one? Meet us (and your local marketing colleagues) at the next HUG ME meetup and see what we're all about.