Posts Tagged marketing 101
Sales and Marketing – Differences Defined
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on March 25th, 2010
Seeded from: http://askdirectmarketers.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/sales-and-marketing-differences-defined/#comment-205
Your question: Selling and marketing are used similarly–they’re interexchangable terms in many people’s minds. Can you explain the difference?
Our answer: In a perfect world, sales and marketing are aligned so well, that it truly is hard to understand where marketing ends and where sales begins. At its most basic, Marketing develops sales leads, by a combination of some of the following disciplines:
- Creating a reputable brand. Creating the right product perception.
- Nurturing leads that are not quite ready to buy.
- Understanding the life-cycle of a prospect, so that sales can close the lead once they are ready to buy.
- Maximizing channels such as advertising, public relations, branding, social marketing and direct response techniques.
Then, sales is responsible for closing the sale–getting that contract signed. The sales process relies on one-on-one relationships. Sales relies on meetings, cold calls, and networking. Sales engages with the prospect or customer on a personal level rather than at a distance.
Personal selling is the process of putting a human being in contact with customers and allowing the relationship that develops to result in a sale for the business. A good salesperson is an excellent listener and always attempts to meet client needs, and match their company’s capabilities to those needs.
When sales and marketing work together, you’ll see the best results. Too often, we see a huge gap between marketing and sales, and oftentimes it’s only a communications issue. Marketing believes that sales are lazy because they’re not working the leads that Marketing worked so hard to acquire. Conversely, sales thinks that marketing’s leads are junk–that they’re not qualified and not nearly ready to buy.
It truly is key to get sales and marketing on the same page. Hold meetings so that each group understands what the others’ goals are. Marketing really needs to listen to sales because they’re closest to the customer. Sales needs to understand what the corporate objectives and overall strategies are so that they can drive to the same strategies. When you can get your sales and marketing teams to work together, you’ll win by having a better pipeline and more closed sales.
Responsibility Shirking. . .to Success!
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on November 2nd, 2009
Help your customers avoid taking responsibility
It’s interesting to see that people are much better at putting up with things that happen to them than they are at living with the consequences of a bad choice.
When you can blame someone else (or the gods of spite, chance and bad luck) it’s emotionally safer than it is to acknowledge you made a lousy choice.
If the weather is freakishly bad on your vacation, you can embrace pity from your friends, and spend your angst cursing the storms.
On the other hand, if you book a trip in the middle of hurricane season, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
This is a great opportunity for marketers and others that want to engage with the public. If you can figure out how to communicate, "it’s not your fault," then people will be grateful, and they’ll return. It might not be right, it might not be mature and it might not be the behavior society wants to advance, but it works.
Even better, figure out how to teach your customers to enjoy taking responsibility. It’s the long term solution that builds a healthy relationship between customer and vendor… you coach them on good choices and they embrace what happens after they make them.
When tactics drown out strategy
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call!, Web 3.0 on August 7th, 2009
This is a profound Sethism
From the Master, Seth Godin
New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them. As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.
Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, "I’m going to post this."
If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.) "Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time" is a strategy.
Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics.
In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.
The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.
The Tao of the Little Shovel
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 18th, 2009
The law of the little shovel
. . .another Sethism! Gawd, I love this man!
If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.
If you walk around town with a little shovel, you’ll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.
Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.
The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it’s not going to start working better just because you use it more often.
Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.
Which leads to two viable strategies:
1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.
2. If you can’t stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don’t get a second time.
Facts Always Win, Right?
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 14th, 2009
Facts always win, right?
Sage and salient word from Seth Godin. . .
If you’re selling a business to business service and you can prove that it’s better, that it delivers more value, that it’s cheaper or more durable or more efficient, shouldn’t that mean you will close every sale?
Even hard-headed business people end up buying the thing they want, not the thing they necessarily need.
The real danger of relying on facts to make your sale, though, is that when the facts are no longer on your side, you’re toast. The low-cost supplier gets hooked on the easy sales that come from acting like a commodity, and if that changes, you’ve got little room to maneuver.
Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to build competitive insulation.
Seth Godin’s The Art & Skill of Working for the “Man”
Posted by admin in Slap In the Face!, Wake Up Call! on July 11th, 2009
The art and skill of working with bureaucrats
Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It’s not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations.
In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn’t. If you want to be good at this capability, you can. You can buy it and learn it and then turn around and sell your skill. But it’s unlikely you will randomly back into it.
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Good Freekin’ Boogly Woogly! Let this wash over you, and read it again. . .and again. . .and again!
Raise your hand if you HAVENT gotten burned by a bureaucracy!
This blog is for you. So comment and tell me what you most want to see here. Im listening!
Tevis
