Does your marketing and sales strategy have a clear objective? All too often I see people using random marketing activities hoping that something somewhere will stick, and they’ll get a customer. That isn’t an approach you want to use. You want measurable results from your marketing efforts, or you don’t want to spend the time and money required for marketing.
Is your marketing and sales strategy aimed at a direct response or lead generation? Direct response is geared toward an immediate sale. The objective of lead generation is to get people to identify themselves as potential clients. Whether your goal is an immediate sale or a lead you have to track your marketing so you know what’s working, what needs improvement, and the cost per lead and cost per sale.
Mel Gibson has a line in one of his movies where he tells his sons to< “aim small miss small” and that’s a great philosophy for you to have in your marketing. You don’t want to send 1,000 mail pieces, make 1,000 cold calls, or run an ad for a year to find out it isn’t working. The small professional service organization needs to focus on much smaller numbers for several reasons. If you mailed 1,000 pieces could you follow-up with all those recipients with a phone call within 72 hours? Would you rather spend $100 or $1,000 to find out how well something works? If an ad doesn’t get a response the first run why would you expect it to produce a response ever?
Your marketing and sales strategy needs to evoke an emotion. What emotion do you want the recipients of your marketing message to feel? People don’t buy for logical reasons they buy for emotional reasons, and explain their decision to others with logic. You know your sales increase when your prospects are emotionally invested in the decision. The same holds true with your marketing. Before you ever develop your message you need to have a clear objective for the emotion your message will focus on.
When you get it right your marketing and sales strategy will save you a lot of time and make you a lot of money. It’s really very simple. Good marketing is about sending the right message to the right people for the right reason in the right way to get the right results. Good marketing amplifies your sales results and makes the whole process much more streamlined and effective.
Would you like to learn more about your sales skills? Try this Sales Skills Analysis and find out where your opportunities for improvement are.
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