Ask yourself this tough question: Your failed marketing campaign – is your company the part that failed?

Sometimes you do a direct mail piece, or a radio spot, or pay-per-click on the internet, and it just wasn’t a good effort, and it fails. It happens. Hopefully, not very often, but it happens.

You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do it smarter next time, imbued with the valuable knowledge that failure gave you.

But, sometimes, the marketing campaign your small business spent a lot of money on works great, and really brings in the calls or the emails or the walk-ins. The problem is not the campaign, the problem is what happened when all those eager prospects contacted your company.

No one answered the phone. Or, the customer was on hold for 10 minutes. Or, it went to voicemail, and your voicemail system is hard to navigate, and they gave up, or, it went to voicemail, and it took two days for someone to call them back.

Maybe someone answered right away, but they were rude or completely indifferent. Maybe the customer wanted more information, and this annoyed your employee, and that turned the prospect off. Maybe the person answering your phone is difficult to understand, or is obviously uneducated in their use of English.

The same problems could be present in terms of answering emails, except more so – when people email you after seeing something online, they are looking for a very quick (preferably immediate) response. And if you can’t provide that, they’re already online and will just contact another provider. Timeliness of response is very important if you’re going to do online advertising, whether its search engine results, SMM, Twitter, etc.

Ditto for in-store interactions. If someone walks into your place and asks about the advertised special, and your clerk doesn’t even look up from her texting as she points to the special, well, then you’ve got a problem.

So, before you write off that last marketing push as a failure, or, take your employees’ word for it when they tell you, “Oh, the people we got from that ad were time-wasters, we couldn’t do anything with them”, make sure you know where the problem is. If it’s the ad or the direct mail piece, that’s one thing. But, if the problem is what’s happening at your company after the great ad brings eager prospective customers to you, well, that calls for a different set of fixes.