We get many e-mails and phone calls asking for advice on how to increase sales and promote a business. They usually are for products and services that businesses have spent a great deal of time and money developing.

The following is a brief excert from a Los Angeles Times article (registration required) about Volcom Sportswear.

At the start, the partners didn't have any product, Brimer said, so they cranked out stickers bearing a stone logo and the name "Volcom," whose precise origins remain somewhat murky 14 years after the fact.

Soon, kids were clamoring for stuff that didn't exist."He established a buzz about the product before there was ever a product," said Brimer, whose shop would become Volcom's first retail account. "It was the most effective preemptive advertising campaign I've ever observed firsthand."

When Volcom actually delivered its first shorts and swim trunks to Frog House, they "sold like crazy," Brimer recalled.

Volcom took the typical business paradigm and flipped it upside down, much like Tony Hawk does a skateboard. And both have made millions by doing so.

Business owners and managers far too often get bogged down in the details of product development and think of marketing as a process that begins after the product is ready to be shipped. What we can learn from Volcom is that marketing is a process that should start BEFORE you spend your money developing a product or service. By doing so, you create a tremendous demand in the market, and can even use that demand to help secure funding to fully develop the product you wanted to sell in the first place!

To learn more about ways to put this into practice for your own business, check out our Attract More Business Full Day Workshops.