Oh great. So now what should you do? Well, I guess you could cross your fingers and spend more money. Or, you could try to guess which half is a waste, and eliminate it.
The main problem is one of measurement (or lack of measurement). There are tons of marketing geeks out there that want to take your money and promise thousands of views and clicks.
The problem with Marketing Geeks:
- While there are a few competent folk out there, many of the marketing geeks have read “Online Marketing for Dummies” and now consider themselves experts in the field. Very few have demonstrable results and successful clients you can call for a reference.
- Likes, views and clicks seldom translate into money in the bank. And those same marketing geeks don’t want to be accountable for results. They make no guarantees.
- They rarely even know how to properly measure results other than looking at Google analytics.
First let’s define exactly what marketing is:
I’ve heard it explained that marketing is the process of getting the ducks to come and land in your yard. Sales on the other hand, is the process of shooting the sitting ducks.
Ok, maybe you’re not a duck hunter. So let me explain it differently.
Marketing is all about surfacing opportunities. While sales is all about closing opportunities. These are two completely different skill sets. And it is extremely rare to find a person who excels in both of these skill sets at the same time. More often, you will find someone who is an excellent marketer (they know how and where to generate leads), and someone else who is an excellent sales person (they are great at closing deals).
Many times, SMB’s (Small/Medium Businesses) expect their sales people to have both of these skill sets. And that’s where the frustration starts, especially when sales do not match expectations…
Marketing excellence requires the marketing process to generate:
- Enough opportunities
- At the right time
- With the right prospects
- At the right pricing
If your marketing process is not working right, then you are not getting the right opportunities. You’ll be wasting your time and resources chasing the wrong prospects (or at a minimum, less desirable prospects).
On the other hand, when the marketing process is functioning well, your sales process can do a much more effective job maintaining and even growing your sales.
What should your marketing process look like?
The marketing process consists of various specific campaigns or actions that are intentionally created to yield specific results within a specific market segment. By defining your market segment(s), its size, and its location, you now have the opportunity to create specific campaigns that should attract attention and generate leads.
Many SMB’s fail to clearly define their market segments, and also fail to define their size. Then they wonder why sales are not meeting goals. Some market segments are too small to achieve your sales targets. In others, you might need to capture a huge share of the market segment to achieve sales targets.
The larger the size of the market share you need, the less optimal the prospects become. As a point of reference, you should be able to achieve your sales targets with less than 20% of the market share. That way you have the opportunity of being somewhat selective in deciding who you’d like to pursue in that segment. And you have the opportunity of saying “NO” to prospects that you don’t resonate with.
If you can’t achieve your sales targets with existing market segments, all is not lost. That simply means you need additional market segments. So go find them, silly…
Now it’s time for the rubber to meet the road…
Here are the specifics of how to define, create, and manage your marketing campaigns:
- Define 3-4 specific marketing campaigns or activities
- Decide the kind and quality of collateral materials you’ll need for each campaign (formatted emails, brochures, splash pages, website content, prospect list(s), etc)
- Decide how you will track the campaigns once the leads start coming in (usually some sort of CRM system) – this will help you what is working (or not)
- Determine the funding and time required (Will you be using an outside service? If so, we may have a referral for you to consider)
- Make sure your sales process is ready for the leads (how many times have you responded to a marketing campaign and heard nothing back from the organization – what a waste of money and effort!)
But wait, You’re not done yet…
Once your marketing process is running, you need a crossover process to start tracking the opportunities in the sales process. We call that the “sales funnel.”
What the heck is a Sales Funnel? Check out our article on that here.
