Blue Spur
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What goes into a great marketing strategy?
Unresolved issues that are buried come back later in bigger and uglier ways.
To come up with a great marketing strategy, you need to be willing to ask hard questions, give straight answers, bruise egos, lose face, break hearts, and kill all your darling ideas. At the core of the marketing strategy is honesty. If you can’t get at the truth of what your company is about, who you are, and how you are actually received by customers, you can never create a marketing strategy that lives up to its full potential. Allowing anyone to sugar coat the facts or assert and overly-optimistic view of the market will lead to a shortfall of projections and earn the distrust of shareholders. This is the time to be brutally honest.
How does marketing impact closing the sale?
First, we need to lay down some assumptions about your sales staff. We will assume they are gregarious, relationship builders who’ve already been through a number of training classes to hone their people skills and bring home the bacon. In short, you should be starting with professionals. The newbie sales people should be surrounded by enough experienced rainmakers to keep them on the right way or show them the highway.
When these talented salespeople go into a company to sell their solution, is the contact warm or cold? Is he well-informed, uninformed, or misinformed? How much time does a salesperson spend warming up a cold contact? How difficult is it to create an accurate impression of the company if the prospect has heard nothing, or worse, has a total misconception about the nature of the business? Too often, sales people spend all their time trying to build an image of the company and never get to the close. The deals they do close are few and far between.
Are your close ratios amazing?
Consider whether this describes your business:
Every prospect understands exactly what my business is about. They understand what my company does and why we do it. They come to us because they know exactly how we are better than the competition in ways that make a difference to them. Our customer loyalty is second to none because we have identified and communicated how we meet their needs on an emotional and intellectual level. Our marketing communication receive immediate response. We are able to close the deal with every qualified prospect.
Do businesses like this really exist? Can you close the deal with every qualified lead?
Why Research?
One of the first sales jobs I had was selling printing. Working in the publishing industry I had purchased a lot of printing and understood the process well. I thought, “I’ve been the target market for several years, I can sell this product in my sleep.” The truth was that although I had been a buyer of the product I was woefully unaware of the issues that faced most of the people to whom I was selling. They were facing corporate issues, interoffice politics, budget constraints, unrealistic deadlines, and an array of other issues I really hadn’t faced in my publishing experience. Printing to me had been the main product around which budgets and timelines were created. In other businesses, creating printed materials was far from the mainstream business and often understaffed and under-funded. I quickly learned that I didn’t understand my customer as well as I had thought. I met with our marketing people, and we began to gather and document customer information.
It’s All About the Product, Isn’t It?
So much of business is built around things. A company banks its future on a hot new product. Product management is the hub of manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Large companies drive out small companies with the promise of saving money. Advertising links happiness to cars, houses, and things to fill up our houses and empty our wallets.
Early in my career as a marketing consultant, one of the first things I used to do was look at the product line, immediately followed by a look at the cash-flow and debt load of the company. In other words, conventional business practice had taught me that marketing was all about what you wanted to sell and how much money you had to sell it. Then I would do consumer research to justify my ideas about repackaging, branding, and advertising the product.
