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Is your business growing slower than you think it should? Do you suspect its slow pace might have something to do with ineffective marketing? Most entrepreneurs feel their business should be growing faster, but few know how to isolate the problem. Today we’re going to fix that.

The elements that affect the growth of your business will fit into one of four distinct categories. Understand these categories, and you’ll have a solid framework for self-examination:

1. Share of Voice
What's your percentage of the total exposure for all the businesses in your category? How much of the total signage is yours? What about TV advertising? Radio advertising? Newspaper? Direct mail? Web traffic? If there are news stories related to your category, do they mention your brand or someone else’s? What percentage of the word-of-mouth advertising is yours? Each of these things contributes to your total share of voice.

Share of voice can be purchased. But be careful--most advertisers attempt to reach too many people. A message of true importance needs to be delivered only once to be remembered. But is your message really that important to your customers? Is it safe to assume your message will be remembered after being heard only once or twice? Problem: You’re reaching too many people with too little repetition. Solution: Buy more repetition from fewer vendors.

Tip: Be an important advertiser to one or two audiences instead of an invisible advertiser to three or four.

2. Impact Quotient
I’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were either reaching too many people with too little repetition or delivering a message that no one cared about. You’re going to be surprised how many people suddenly become “the right people” when you begin delivering a more impressive message.

To be impressive, your message must first be believable, so close the loopholes in your message:

Loophole open: Advertisers often cry, “Everything Must Go!” But the listener is thinking, “Or what? What happens if you don’t sell it? You’ll just come up with some new angle next week, right?”

Loophole closed: “Everything must go! Any jewelry not sold by the end of the day will be melted down and sold as scrap. This means that until 9 o’clock tonight, you can buy finished jewelry for slightly more than the value of the raw materials.”

3. Personal Experience Factor
Are you exceeding your customer’s expectations or falling short? Do you have the brands they prefer, or are you pushing a weak alternative? Are your prices higher or lower than your customers expected?

A strong ad will only temporarily prop up a business that delivers a weak personal experience factor. Remember: Unimpressive reputations nullify impressive ads. Have you been trying to solve an internal problem with external advertising?

4. Market Potential
What will be the total dollar volume sold in your product or service category this year? Do you know the total potential volume for your trade area? What percentage of that financial pie is yours? If you don’t have access to this information, there are two easy ways to get it:

1. Carefully list every competitor you face along with your best estimate of their sales volume in your trade area. This can usually be done with a reasonable degree of accuracy. How many employees do they have? How much inventory? Square footage? Estimate objectively, and don’t leave anyone out.
   
   
2. Contact a trade organization or use Google to find a figure for total, nationwide sales volume in your category. Divide that number by the population of the United States (currently about 298,500,000) to get a per capita sales volume. Multiply that number times the population of your trade area. I think you’ll be surprised how close the two numbers are.

It’s easier to grow small businesses than large ones. Show me a business selling only 5 percent of the market potential in their category, and I’ll show you a business with huge growth potential. Show me a competitor eight times as large--one that’s currently selling 40 percent of their market potential--and I’ll show you a business that’s going to have to work very hard to hang on to what they’ve got.

Uncommitted customers are the easiest to steal. Consequently, early growth comes with less effort than later growth, when the low-hanging fruit has all been picked. The business selling 40 percent of their market potential must now fight to win those customers who have some degree of loyalty to a competitor. Rarely does a business achieve more than 40 percent of the total potential volume in their product or service category.

Examine your business through the four lenses of share of voice, impact quotient, personal experience factor and market potential, and you’ll quickly identify what’s been holding you back.

Advertising can’t change your personal experience factor or your market potential. But a focused media plan will dramatically improve your share of voice, and better ad writing will dramatically increase your impact quotient.

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Roy William's is Entrepreneur.com's"Advertising" columnistand the founder and president of international ad agency Wizard of Ads. Roy is also the author of numerous books on improving your advertising efforts, including The Wizard of Ads and Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.

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SAN ANTONIO - For Scott Winters, a master inventor, distinguished engineer and director of development at IBM in Austin, inspiration can come from anywhere.

"Wherever I go now I constantly see things that I can do better or different, whether it's going to the supermarket or a football game or driving the car and coming to work," said Winters, 51.

He was sitting in the food court at an Austin mall while his family shopped when he came up with a new system for a cell phone network that he later patented. Winters modeled a directory of cellular services on the way kiosk vendors display their merchandise.
That kind of innovative thinking makes Winters one of the top patent producers at IBM. He received 25 patents last year; during his 18 years with the company, his total is 65 patents and another 40 pending.

For the 14th consecutive year, IBM topped the list of patent recipients, according to IFI Claims Patent Services, which compiles its annual report from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data.

"Electronic technology is a hot area these days and will continue to be," said Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Claims, based in Wilmington, Del.

Some electronic patents have a short lifespan, so companies are continually filing new ones on the latest innovations, she said.

IBM this week announced that it received a record 3,621 patents in 2006. The Austin campus received 640, up from 550 a year earlier. Fifty were related to Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console, on which IBM worked with Sony and Toshiba.

At IBM, patents are rarely issued to a single person; usually three or four people share in the development of one, said Winters, who develops mentoring groups with people at different stages of their careers.

The patents awarded to Winters last year focus primarily on cell phone software. This year's submissions to the patent office, he said, all will be based on social networking.
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