For over 4 decades (my how time flies), I have helped many global companies and small companies grow their businesses. One of my beliefs is that I have always worked to keep marketing and sales aligned. Marketing should enable sales. Marketing should be tightly linked to generating revenue. Otherwise, why do it at all?

Marketing and selling involve a complex set of personal communications intended to result in a transaction. There are no cookie cutter solutions. This is hard work, especially in a struggling economy.

Your  brand is your story for how you create value for customer (not for yourself; no features and functions). Wherever this can demonstrate real economic value for the customer, success will go up.

Two Teams Climbing the Same Hill — Together

Marketing and sales must collaborate on driving revenue. Stay focused on the revenue objective. Activities that do not work toward revenue generation are wasteful. This takes incredible concentration to do the right things and just the right things.

Your competitive advantage is how you uniquely help customers. You illustrate this by showing how you did this for other customers and intrigue the rest of customers to want the same gains.

Never Fill Your Marketing Box with Features and Functions; Better to Leave it Empty

This needs to drive revenue, without bogging down in trivia. Sell the hope and vision. Sell the new reality with imagination instead of what your product does. The part where you show what your product does and how it does it comes later in the buying process. Give it away too early and the prospect no longer needs a dialogue with you. They then move on to competitors and push everyone into a parity where they can negotiate with you on price rather than on the economic value you best can provide.

Learn from Mistakes.

We recently did a mailer with 3 waffer seals (one on each side of the mailer) … if I got this in the mail it would go in the garbage … who is going to take the time to slit open 3 wafer seals? It was a great mailer, totally ruined in the production process. Stay on top of the details. I blinked and did not catch this 3-seal thing and paid the price.

Minimize Fishing;Market to Known Prospects

Build a prospect database instead of running lead generation campaigns. Market and sell to this database. If it is built correctly, it will include all the companies in your selected markets and all the individuals at these companies who can influence the sale or make the buying decision. This eliminates waste. You spend your efforts on communicating how you provide exceptional value to the same decision makers and influencers non-stop. Repetition with creativity. Never bore them to death.

Marketing to this database is intended to gradually change attitudes about how they are now doing business and how they can more successfully do business with your product and/or service. Repeat your core message by using contextually-relevant creative ways to bring your brand story alive. Use every legal medium you can afford. But always, always tell a value story — one where you helped a client accomplish great things that other prospects will envy. This takes content to tell the story. Lots of content. Today, marketing is largely about producing relevant, powerful content in print, online, video, audio, games. You can probably skip the sandwich boards and Burma Shave signs, but use anything else.

Content is Currency; Be Strategic with What You Give Away

Control the amount of information you provide to prospects at each stage of their buying process; information is your leverage. Once you give it away, they no longer need you. They buyer will want data sheets or demonstrations or pricing, but do not give this type of information until you have the prospect wanting what you are selling. Keep painting the new reality with aspirational stories and with stories of how your past clients overcame barriers to their problems. Keep pulling them forward with customer success stories until they are ready to let you come into their company and work with you on building a success model based on their data.

Sales people need to do the work, make the calls and convert at each stage of the process so they can hand off to the next stage. Each stage has a purpose. Need to reveal intent to spend money with you. Marketing must provide the content that is appropriate to move the prospect forward to the next step in the selling process. As long as you can see movement toward this decision, you are winning. If forward movement does not occur with each conversation, you are losing. When forward movement stops, enter the people at the stalled company into a nurture campaign that maintains awareness and continues to paint the new reality until they are ready to sell.

Understand the Experience. Market the Experience.

Promoting the experience is a complex art, both for marketing and for sales. Make it real for others who have not yet gone through it. Paint the experience of a new reality. How can they believe your new technology can help them close sales faster and more profitably? Everyone says this, but if you have the facts to back up your claim, you can get prospects salivating to get the same results. Never rush to demo. Never rush to features and functions. First get prospects wanting the same kinds of gains that you provided to other customers.

As the number of highly active prospects in the sales funnel becomes smaller, then the one-to-one communications become more intense and more focused on how you can help that one company succeed. To communicate this, you need to do your homework and make sure you are solving the right problem and that this problem is important to their success.

 

 

 

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2. Boost Annual Revenue using Cross-Channel Management
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