Don’t crawl into a hole and give up. Even in a bad economy, you can enjoy big business development wins.

The race is on to make everything smart, and your company needs to be at the head of the pack. No matter what you make, the challenge is to make it operate intelligently. When this happens, you can increase your revenues by saving your customers time, money and effort. The money that comes into your pocket can come from someone else’s pocket, even when the economy isn’t growing.

Be smarter. Make your products and services smarter. You’ll still win.

“I can tell after reading the first paragraph if I’m interested. If the pitch starts with a sob story, I’m out. If the pitch talks about personal issues. I’m out. If the pitch starts off with how big the market opportunity is, I’m out. If the pitch tells me what is unique about the product, how it can make a profit, AND it’s an area where I have expertise, I will read on. From there, it has to be something I feel is a unique product /service that can scale, be profitable AND again, matches my skill set so i can add value. I try to never be just a financial investor and I rarely do deals that are built on financial engineering.”

Read the interview.

How to ask for a referral: According to Jill Griffin, loyalty expert, you should say, “Who do you know that might appreciate knowing about my services?” After you get the first name, say, “Who else do you know?” Repeat the process until your client runs out of names.

Special discount: Customer gets a 5% discount on their next order for a referral.

Discount times two: Customer and friend get a 5% discount on their next order

Discount times two, making the customer look good: Invisible Fence, which protects dogs by outfitting them with collars that keep them in their yards, offers free collar batteries for a year to any customer who refers a new fence customer. The company then sends a $100 gift certificate in the customer’s name to the prospect.

Birthday/special event celebrations: Host an event for a customer on special occasion. This causes them to invite others.

Send a catalog to a friend: Whenever you take orders from customers (i.e. order forms, catalogs, etc.) provide a space in which they can instruct you to send information to a friend or colleague.

Affinity programs: Get special interest groups to align themselves with your offerings (think: Sierra Club MasterCard). The group gets a new income stream; you get the ability to attract people with strong special interests.

Support fundraising efforts: Offer services to non-profit groups and schools at a discount, so that they can resell them at a profit to support their programs.

Thank you letters: Send a thank you letter to a customer just after their order has been delivered. Feel free to ask whether they know of others who would give you the privilege to serve them.

Compensate employees: Offer a special incentive to employees who refer their friends to their company

Referral list: Maintain a list of customers who are happy to be called by prospective customers.

Donut patrol: Drop off doughnuts, candy, fruit baskets or the like to valuable customers. The more dramatic and notable the present, the better. They’re likely to tell others what a unique firm you have.

Digital gifts: Send customers – and prospects – highly useful information in digital form. Make it valuable enough that they are likely to share it with others. (The document you are now reading uses this strategy.)

Free booklets: Provide concise handbooks to customers. Send them one extra for a friend.

Referral cards: Personalize cards for highly valuable customers (perhaps with a photo of the customer and the pool/house/painting/new deck/etc. you sold her.) She can use the cards as an easy way to refer you to a friend and ensure she gets the benefits you offer customers for referrals.

Customer ratings: Encourage customers to rate your products/services publicly (i.e. at your web site) and share these ratings with others. This has some risk, but it shows you have nothing to hide and puts pressure on your team to be ultra-responsive to customers.

Reference letters: Collect letters from delighted customers and post them on your walls, post them on your web site, and include them in prospect mailings.

Insiders Club: Offer special events and/or privileges to customers who generate a certain threshold of referrals. For example, you might hold a special party or invite customers to a sporting event.

VIP service: Offer faster, better service to customers in exchange for referrals.

Free newsletters: Send email newsletters to customers, and make them easy to forward. Include a link at the bottom that makes it easy for someone to sign up for the newsletter after receiving it from a friend.

Share the love: When the press writes about you, send copies to good customers and include an envelope and/or sticky note that makes it easy for them to send the article on to a friend.

Birthday/Anniversary cards: Send one to your customers, along with an incentive to refer a friend.

Free giveaways: Give away highly visible and useful items to loyal customers – with your name on them – such as t-shirts, jackets, bags, portable chairs, etc.

Share the fame: With permission, give credit to customers for better ways to use your products or solve problems your customers share.

Share the photos: Publish pictures of your customers. The world’s largest dairy store operator, Stew Leonards, encourages customers to photograph themselves holding a Stew’s shopping bag at notable places around the word. You can find these photos in the stores, and now you can find bags from this Connecticut retailer all around the world.

IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign has been running for several years, and it makes the case that everything is getting smart, from cities to stadiums to heating systems and even your car.

We couldn’t agree more. The race is on to make dumb products – and systems – smart. If you’re not in this race, you won’t be able to compete much longer.

But how does marketing work on a smarter planet?

First, you have to know what victory means for your company, or as we say, you need to define your WIN. Are you trying to be the richest entrepreneur under 40, or do you wish to have a private company that benefits your descendants long after you are gone?

Once you know this, you need to design intelligence into the systems that connect you to your customers. Instead of selling harder, you need to serve harder. Your service needs to be good enough that customers find you, instead of the other way around. This means getting recommendations from every customer. That should be the standard of excellence at your firm.

You need to be able to listen to each customer, and to react to their feedback. Not in a “thanks for the feedback” lame sort of way, but by fundamentally changing the way you treat them, or the way your products work for them.

Smart products can do this. Dumb ones cannot.

Here’s what won’t keep working: running ads, offering discounts, hiring more aggressive salespeople, or praying.

Baker’s firm, ReCourses, advises design, advertising, public relations, interactive and in-house marketing teams. He says that firms in the marketing field are beginning to understand that the best relationships with their clients are ones in which there is distributed control. In other words, each party has to have some control.

Baker observes, “The client’s control is simple to describe: make it difficult to work with them, not pay promptly, not provide sufficient access, not listen to your strategic advice, etc.

“But what control does the agency have? There’s only one good answer to that, and it’s to withhold their expertise. And if it ever comes to that, the agency will know how much control they had by how easily the client can replace them. Thus, agencies with a narrow but deep expertise are in the driver’s seat because they have something the client desperately needs… and would have trouble finding elsewhere.”

In other words, if you are a generic copywriter, thousands of people can replace you. If you write the best copy for season ticket promotions by professional sports teams, you will always be in demand.

How is the relentless spread of information technology impacting this situation?

David argues, “Clients have access to information, which they didn’t in the past, so they can test an ‘expert’s’ ideas against widely published best practices. They also have an expectation of narrow expertise. I call that the Google-affect. If I need a very specific question answered, there is bound to be an expert or more in that field, and Google will lead me to them. That didn’t used to be the case.”

He shared with us a number of examples of agencies that do one thing superbly. Follow these links, and you’ll see the utter clarity and focus each firm brings to their site. There is no doubt what they do, or how:

The Linus Group – marketing for life science, instrumentation, and diagnostics services; I particularly like their opening video

Currency Marketing – changing the way credit unions attract Gen Y

BigDuck – smart communications for nonprofits

Zehno – full service marketing for educational institutions

• Are people texting or checking email during meetings?

• When you talk to someone, is he or she often doing something else?

• When customers call someone, do they hear them typing in the background?

• Do employees get conflicting messages from your company? Does one memo stress that “sales is our top focus,” and then another criticize your team for not providing better service?

• Do meetings often conflict with other meetings and obligations?

• Are employees overloaded with “urgent” but ultimately unimportant tasks?

• Are opinions given more weight than facts, and facts that are too hard to unearth (hello, siloed databases) ignored?

• Do forceful personalities have more say than intelligent and creative ones?

• Are people often promoted because they are personable (i.e. their boss likes them), rather than because they focus well on what matters most?

Distraction is the enemy of winning. If you recognize your company in the above points, then perhaps it is not clear to your employees what’s important now (hint: that stands for “win”.)