When business leaders want to grow their organisations, they often focus on selling harder and may use marketing in a self-aggrandising way. Discover six ways organisations can structure their marketing to support their sales goals instead.
Peter Drucker wrote many years ago...
"There will always, one can assume, be the need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product and service fits him and sells itself."
I think this is an excellent starting point. Before making the sale, we want to achieve some unpaid outcomes. Outcomes like:
- Becoming more trusted
- Becoming more respected
- Becoming more sought-after
- Becoming more credible
- Becoming perceived as an industrial authority
- Deepened brand loyalty
- Becoming more pre-emptive in your positioning, so clients don't leave your company for lower prices
- Becoming more attractive to referral and repeat business
And as a result of achieving these traits, the company will increase its revenues.
In his book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, sales wizard Chet Holmes reports that:
In most organisations, the focus is on the 3% and they ignore the other 67% of buyers who would buy later, but need some nurturing beforehand.
With good marketing, you can engage that magic 67%. And as you do that, some prospects from the world walk into your 67% range - that is, they will do business with you later. But some prospects walk out of the 67% range and walk into your 3% range - being ready, willing and able to do business with you, on your terms and at your full fees.
But changing focus from 3% of the market to 67% of is a big jump. So, either we do it the way we've done it before, and hire more people and engage more resources - or we change our approach.
6 ways to get your marketing to support your sales goals
- Use direct response marketing
Change your marketing from self-centred, image-driven institutional (corporate) marketing to education-based, market value-driven, results-accountable direct response marketing.
Make sure every piece of marketing you put out requires a specific response, so you can track your marketing's effectiveness. Then you can tweak good campaigns for better response and dump the duds before you lose your shirt.
Direct response marketing enables you to connect with buyers who are pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed to do business with your company. They are also pre-empted to your pricing, which eliminates sticker shock and fee resistance. It also makes sure that you don't waste precious resources on those only in search of the lowest prices.
- Talk about your market's afflictions and aspirations
Convert your marketing materials from talking about yourself, your company and your company's achievements to talking about your market's afflictions and aspirations. When you talk about industry-specific problems, always expand the problems to long-term consequences if the problem is not solved. It's like a doctor's telling their patient, "You have advanced cancer and have two months to live". This is not scaremongering, but reality.
Always use the kind of language that boardroom dwellers use amongst each other when discussing their companies' futures. You may sell CRM software, but your buyers want to hear about higher sales through better communication between salespeople and their prospects.
- Aim for only your best clients
Use your marketing in such a way that it becomes an effective buyer selector. Create a Perfect Client Profile: Both demographic and psychographic profiles of:
- The perfect buyer
- The perfect company
- The perfect project
Then create all your marketing materials with those attributes in mind. Match both the look and feel and the copy of your collaterals to your perfect client.
With this approach, you can sift, sort, screen and select the cream of the crop of your target market (top 1-3%), and unceremoniously dump the rest into the welcoming arms of your competitors.
- Automate your marketing
You can do this because a large chunk of your marketing is about serving valuable content to your market to attract the right prospects and to aid their decision-making. Focus on creating great content and let the market use it as a buffet.
In the early stages, prospects don't want to talk to you, so don't waste time and effort on trying to meet them in person. Let them "consume" your content as they get hungry for it, and when they are ready for a change, they will come to you for help.
- Give prospects plenty of free content
Make sure your prospects consume plenty of your free content before you attempt to set appointments with them and sell your services. If you make it a bit too long, that's not a problem, but if you make it too short, you may get dumped pretty swiftly.
Set up auto-responder sequences, and program your email list management system to deliver content to your prospects on a regular basis. And then just keep adding to this sequence.
According to research by marketing experts Hubspot, nurtured emails get 4-10 times higher response than standalone email offers. Gleanster Research estimates that 50% of all leads are qualified to buy, but are not ready yet. If you force them to make buying decisions, they leave you forever.
- Give them small bites, regularly
Before launching new services (or products), design a pre-launch sequence, which is a sequence of valuable content. You can use copy, audio or video, and they all are very effective.
Serve 3 - 5 pieces of valuable content (PDF, audio, video, etc.) before asking the market to buy your services. This sequence familiarises your market with your brand and the new services you're launching. In one step, you can achieve both brand awareness and sales lead generation.
And if you do all this while you are flooded with business, you can't exhibit the typical signs of being hungry for new business. After all, you're still fully booked on your existing services.