There are more than 3 reasons but I doubt you'd be reading this if I had said 285000 reasons businesses neglect their marketing, so I'll just give you three.

Marketing is easy
SO many small business owners have admitted that in their heads, marketing is the same as advertising and generally, is a one-off, quick win activity.
An advert in a national newspaper or a load of brochures may seem like something substantial but its incredibly rare that someone is there tracking it’s return in to the business. Ideally these activities should all be bundled up and well thought out under a strategy to ensure they hit the right customers with the right messages with relevancy.
What I’ve seen from clients that now work with me is that their previous activity had brought no results, as is was too wide reaching and they missed the target group; their timing was wrong and they confused the end user because of lack of brand clarity.

We sell ourselves, people know what we do
Do they? DO THEY?
This one always baffles me. When SMEs ‘grow up’, they get used to the fact that their network was small and then it grew. It has often grown through word of mouth and networks built up over time. As small businesses get bigger, the challenge of attracting new customers and keeping the existing ones alive becomes more complicated.
Clarity of messaging is diluted through internal company growth and natural changes in company culture, too many cooks and a lack of strategy that is linked back to the original business vision. We are in a buyers’ market, unless you pick your timing and tell people what you do, why you do it and what the benefit is to them, they will be looking elsewhere.

I have sales, I don’t need marketing
You have a great sales team and they know everyone in the industry, right? They do their own marketing and you have a website, you occasionally reach out to existing clients when you remember.
A lot of marketing is done before the sales process begins, market research, target sector analysis and opportunity spotting (especially in strategic marketing) are all part of the marketing process. Without these, the sales team, longer-term, are less likely to see new opportunities and are less likely to retain existing customers due to lack of ongoing industry knowledge. Sales need to be doing what they love to be productive, making transactions, building relationships and progressing the business.
Marketing should not be seen as a support function but as an essential part of a synergy with sales in order to maximise the opportunity for growth. Marketing do the pre-amble to feed sales, sales make the relationships, marketing feed and nurture the relationships, sales make further sales.
If there are any gaps in your sales and marketing offering, get in touch HERE