The fish rejects your fly for the same reason that prospects ignore your message.

By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon

Last week, I met a couple of old college buds in Southwest Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton range (near LaBarge) to take on Wyoming’s Cutt-Slam cutthroat fishing challenge.

This would not be easy. Four cutty subspecies in four different drainages – some of them in the tiniest of water (water shoes rather than waders), with two guys who are much more experienced than I am in the fine art of selling to fish.

This effort would be much like marketing and sales in a tough market with a prospect who knows exactly what they want and will accept nothing less. The parallels are fairly obvious: your message (fly), your presentation (cast) and your careful selection of the right prospect (in this trip, only four subspecies mattered).

Early on, unheard and unseen

For the better part of two days, I caught nothing. You would have thought I was making carpet cleaning offers to people with hardwood floors, or trying to sell family minivans to folks who live 20 miles off the highway on a rough dirt road.

At some point late on the afternoon of day two, one of the guys mentioned to me that the local hoppers were a good bit bigger than the flies I was using. Sending the wrong message (fly) to the wrong fish is no different than sending the wrong message to the wrong prospect (or sending any message to the disinterested).

So I changed my message.

Before long, the change in fly size improved my luck, at least until the last day. Ultimately, the Grey’s River contingent of Snake River Cutthroats never responded to my cold calls on that last day, perhaps due to an early morning downpour.

How’s your message working?

Obviously, the point of this story is to provoke you to take a look at the messages you’re sending and who you’re sending them to. For retailers, the most important sales and marketing period of your business year is ramping up. For those who serve tourists, what you do in the “off season” is as important. No matter what you sell, knowing that the message you send (even if you use “inbound” marketing) is being seen / heard by the right people and is context with their needs is critical.

Photo by ©Tony Reinhardt.

Wrong message, wrong destination equals wasted money, time and effort. Even a little bit wrong is enough for someone (or a fish) to think “Oh, that’s not for me, I’m moving on.”

You’ve heard this before, but have you thought deeply about it? Think about the messages you get each day. How many of them truly grasp your interest? It doesn’t matter how clever or funny they are if they’re not about something you care about or are interested in. How many of these messages are about something you’re really interested in? How many of those convey a message that motivates you to actually take action?

That’s the critical eye you need to use when looking at each message you’re sending, whether sending a postcard or using the latest, greatest sophisticated inbound marketing tool.

When that fish fails to strike, you know why (sort of). It’s the wrong size, the wrong color, the wrong depth, the wrong time of year, etc. There are so many different ways to serve up the wrong fly – and it’s no different for what you use to communicate with prospects and clients.

Big (Fish) Data

Wyoming Game and Fish’s Cutt-Slam is, among other things, a combination of clever marketing and inexpensive data collection.

For the price of some record keeping, photography, a website, some color certificates (for participants who complete the Slam) and some cutthroat subspecies info, the Cutt-Slam provokes fly fishing enthusiasts to purchase licenses, eat and stay in Wyoming, fish the state’s southwestern waters and report details about the fish they caught, including date, location and a photo.

What this provides to WY Game and Fish is a litany of data and evidence about the progress of their efforts to repopulate the state’s four cutthroat subspecies – without sending people out on the road.

It’s a smart way to get people to visit, fish and help you with your project’s data collection – all at the same time.

Likewise, it provides a lesson on creativity and thinking about how to do more than what you have to get done – and how to involve enthusiastic experts in a way that benefits them as well.

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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.