1. The most important order you ever get from a customer is the second order.

2. In direct mailing, spend 10 percent of your budget on testing.

3. Understanding and adapting to consumer motivation and behavior is not an option, but an absolute necessity for competitive survival.

4. A well-designed catalog mailed to a qualified response list will probably bring a 2% response.

5. Know the power of repetition. Be sure that your message is consistent.

6. The two most common mistakes companies make in using the phone is failing to track results and tracking the wrong thing.

7. Marketing activities should be designed to increase profits, not just sales.

8. It cost five times as much to sell to a new customer than to an existing customer.

9. Selling what your customers need instead of what they want can lead to failure.

10. Don’t think that product superiority, technology, innovation or company size will sell itself.

11. Don’t neglect or ignore your current customers while pursuing new ones.

12. People don’t buy products, they buy the benefits and solutions they believe the products provide.

13. The average business never hears from 96% of its dissatisfied customers.

14. Fifty percent of those customers who complain would do business with the company again if their complaints were handled satisfactorily.

15. It is estimated that customers are twice as likely to talk about their bad experiences as their good ones.

16. Marketing is everyone’s business, regardless of title or position in the organization.

17. Exaggerated claims can produce inflated expectations that the product or service cannot live up to, thereby resulting in dissatisfied customers.

18. Get to know your prime customers—the 20% of product users account for 80% of the total consumption of that product class.

19. Telephone-generated leads are likely to close four to six times greater than mail-generated leads.

20. The two ways to sustain superior performance are to take exceptional care of customers through superior service and quality, and to constantly innovate.

21. The Rule of Thirds: For a given catalog, one third of the merchandise will sell well, one third will sell OK, and one third will bomb.

22. Properly designated and used, research efforts can significantly lower the risks of marketing failure.

23. There are three foundations for marketing decisions: 1) research, 2) experience, and 3) intuition. None is complete without the other.

24. Marketers should spend 25% of their time in the field, learning from and listening to their customers.

25. About 90% of all product introductions ultimately either fail or fall short of potential.

26. Personal influence (word-of-mouth) has a more decisive role in influencing behavior than advertising and other marketer-dominated sources.

27. The more information that can be given visually, through observation or actual product demonstration, the greater the impact on awareness and stimulation of interest.

28. Gaining the consumer’s attention is possibly the most formidable challenge a marketer faces.

29. The consumer’s perception of price is usually more important than actual price.

30. The customer is not dependent on you, you are dependent on the customer.

31. If you don’t stay in contact with your customer, someone else will attract that customer's business.

32. Plan your business operations for the convenience of the customer. Make it easy to do business with you.

33. If customers call with questions, your catalog isn’t doing its job.

34. Forty percent of people who receive free gifts can remember the name of the advertiser as long as six months later.

35. The two biggest mistakes in marketing are spending too much and spending too little.

36. Remember that small shares of gigantic markets can be abundant and profitable.

37. Identify your competitive advantages, and then focus your marketing effort on them.

38. Always remember that it’s best to under-promise and over-deliver.

39. It’s hard to manage something that you can’t measure.

40. Develop back-end marketing strategies; ways to resell to customers through updates, new versions, complimentary products.

41. If you can't be first in a category, try selling up a new category to be first in.

42. Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.

43. Find ways to turn current customers into a sales force.

44. The credibility and persuasiveness of your marketing efforts increases in direct proportion to the amount of specific information you provide.

45. Treat sales transactions not as an end, but as a beginning of a relationship.