Call it a desire to always have a strong reward for their actions, something immediate that they can understand and latch onto. That immediate thing is the next sale, which is why they spend so much of their time focusing on the way things look, sound, and different formats.

For a company who uses a lot of catalog printing the marketers are going to be more likely to focus all of their attention on the way each catalog looks. They worry about the placement of products in the catalog, whether or not the print catalogs are doing the best job possible at bringing in their customers.

But this is often all they focus on, even though there is quite a bit more to be concerned with.

What I'm referring to here is the need to make sure that everything remains organized. You have to keep track of everything that you've done in order to be sure that you're not only advancing, but never repeating anything you've done before.

That's the challenge for someone who isn't keeping track of anything. They view each catalog printing order one at a time rather than devoting their attention to all of the ones that they've done in the past.

Going even beyond the design side of things there is a lot of work that needs to be done managing who your customers are and how many people you have receiving your catalogs. Now, knowing the exact number of people who you're sending things to is easy, because that's your mailing list, but how much do you know about them in relation to the area they're in?

If you have five hundred people in a city receiving your catalog do you know what percentage of potential customers that five hundred is? Are you getting business from the majority of the people who would have any interest in doing business with you, or are you only achieving success with a handful of them.

All of this is important information to know, but it can be rather boring establishing it all, and what most of it leads to is better organization in your marketing, rather than immediate sales, and that's why it gets overlooked so often. In the quest for the next sale the structure needed to help you get sales is forgotten.

Take the time to lay down a firm foundation in your marketing. Set up a system where you can easily track what you've been doing and what you need to do next. Initially setting up this system might not get you more sales, but once you start using it I think you'll begin to notice a nice change in the way your marketing is run.