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Sales and Marketing - The Life (or Death) of your Business
[NOTE: This post is part of a series on Entrepreneurship 101 to give a kick-start to those who are thinking about starting their own business. Our regular Job-Seeking and Career-Improvement programming will continue soon!]
Here’s the most difficult reality for the majority of technically proficient people starting a new business: You MUST sell. To people you don’t know. Every day.
How you do that is another matter (which we’ll discuss today). But until you’re ready to grasp the truth above, you’re not ready to start your business.
Grasped it? Great!
Now let’s move on to the more tactical discussion of how you’re going to do that selling. Don’t be afraid. It’s not that scary.
DISCLAIMER: This discussion is a little long, I admit. But, heck! We’re discussing all of sales and marketing (a very large topic) in one post, so cut me some slack!
WHAT IS SALES AND WHAT IS MARKETING?
Many people’s conceptions of sales and marketing are intertwined and confused. So, the best thing for us to do is to start with common definitions:
Sales is the act of finding interested prospects for your product / service; interacting with, following up with, and getting referrals from those prospects; and closing (which only really means, “asking to buy”) those prospects.
Marketing is the development of business differentiators (ie. “reasons to buy specifically from you and not your competition”), finding outlets for displaying those differentiators, and to drive qualified prospects to the salesforce (in the beginning, that would be you!)
So, a good way to think about it is that “Marketing” is more the strategic, thinking aspect of the entire sale while “Sales” is the practical, “feet on the street” doing the work of the sale.
And important distinction to keep in mind is that you can keep a company moving with sales and without marketing (though you’re obviously hampering your efforts), but you CANNOT stay in business with marketing and without sales.
Keep that in mind when you have a little money to spend either on marketing (a new ad, for instance) or on sales (lunches with prospects, etc.).
WHY YOU SHOULDN’T HIRE A SALESPERSON RIGHT AWAY
A lot of new business owners immediately go on the hunt for a salesperson to do the distasteful work of selling. After all, it makes sense that if you don’t like a portion of the responsibilities of your business, that you should hire someone who can do them well.
As I said in the beginning of this post, however, sales is different. You have to do it, every day, with people you don’t know. If you can’t force yourself to do that, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
You can’t hire salespeople until you, yourself, “know the sale”. That means that you understand how prospects react to your approach, your message, your differentiator, your pricing….the whole enchilada. Otherwise, you’re going to direct your salesperson to do things that aren’t going to work and will frustrate the heck out of him. And you.
You’ve got to do the grunt work of sales (and marketing) in the beginning and the most successful business owners learn to love it.
DEVELOPING YOUR OWN MARKETING - ON THE CHEAP
One of the ways that business owners take away from some of the gruntiest of the grunt work of sales is to develop marketing to help drive qualified prospects into the business. That is, people already predisposed to be interested in your product or service are calling you rather than the other way around.
The problem is that most traditional marketing is expensive and of dubious benefit. For instance, here is one of the most marketing-saturated locations in the country. Do you think that these are really influencing anyone at this point? Or, perhaps, are they there for the prestige?
So, you go to hire someone for marketing. The problem is that most marketing people who can help you at this stage are even more expensive. And will try to drain every last dollar from you. And then come back for more.
Before you market, you need to know what you’re marketing. You need to have a “marketing message”. That is, a statement of benefit that your product or service brings to people. As you have probably noticed, larger brands can get away with more ephemeral marketing messages, such as “Coke ads Life” or Mazda’s “Zoom Zoom”.
Lesser known brands (you, for instance) are going to have to be a little more explicit. Think along the lines of very descriptive, benefit-laden marketing messages such as Domino’s (original) message of “Hot, Fresh Pizza Delivered In 30 Minutes Or It’s Free”.
That one was very specific about what you got with Dominoes AND it was good because none of their competitors delivered that benefit. Also, be aware of the myriad things that it does not promise: tasty, good, high quality, thick, big, good value, etc.
I don’t know what your marketing message is, but you’ve got to figure this out first. But the best marketing messages say WHO they are for, WHAT they are for, and WHY they are different.
For instance: “Investment Counselling guaranteeing 15% annual return for investors with more than $1mil to invest” or “Pizza guaranteed to remind you of Chicago or your money back” or “Expert Enterprise-Level Java Coding with FREE Lifetime Updates”.
(Of course, you could pay me a lot of money to develop one of these for you, but I wouldn’t recommend that. You know your product or service better than I probably ever will.)
CHEAP MARKETING TECHNIQUES FOR EVERYONE
So, what do you do with your marketing message once you have it figured out? You get it into the hands of people who have a high probability of buying your product or service. While that can be pretty expensive, here are some ideas on how to market on the cheap.
There are two things to keep in mind with these techniques: First, they will not work immediately. You’ll need to be giving out your card on a regular basis before they start coming back to you, but they’re cheap and you never know where they’ll end up.
Second, you should really do as many as possible. They are all little helps that will add up to good business, but one on it’s own might not do much.
- E-Mail Signatures - Everyone does this, right? A lot of people do, but it’s all about contacting the person involved. It’s not about the differentiator of their business and giving people a reason to click through. Make it short, but make it interesting enough to make people wonder, “I wonder what that’s all about?”
- Unique Business Cards - Business cards are everywhere. Well, except in my pocket. Most of my business has been by referral and/or through my website. However, even I am planning on getting business cards. But, not plain ‘ol everyday business cards!
When you make a business card, you should always print on both sides. The first side can be relatively standard. But on the back, you should be sure to have you differentiator for everyone to see. And, if you want to make people hand on to them, you should make them with an offer attached. Something like, “Bring this card in for 50% off expert toast browning” or whatever it is that you do.
- Regular Newsletters - This could be either electronic (if you have their e-mail addresses) or paper, but the idea is that you can get your message in front of your prospect as much as possible.
Keep in mind that your newsletter doesn’t have to be (and probably shouldn’t be) all about your service / industry. It can be generally useful information to your target client with one little message from you each week / month / however often you send it out.
- Stickers / Magnets / “Point of Thought” Items - The idea here is that you want your message and contact information in front of people when and where they’re thinking about your category.
For instance, if you’re servicing equipment, put a sticker with your contact information and marketing message on every piece of equipment you service so they know who to call when it breaks down the next time.
If you’re selling anything ordered primarily over the phone, order a phone cord detangler with your marketing message and contact information.
If you’re into automotive, give away tire tread checkers, tire pressure gauges, a car junk holder, or anything that gets done on a car regularly.
You get the idea.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
I know this is all a lot to digest, but remember that sales is the lifeblood of your business and absolutely necessary for you to get involved with.
And keep in mind that the main reason that you’re going to be involved in the sales and marketing is that you need to adapt to your market. Maybe they don’t care about getting a discount on consulting services if they don’t know that you’re any good. Perhaps a free toothpick with every jetliner ordered isn’t enough incentive.
Whatever the problems are with your original sales/marketing concept and how your market receives it (and there will be problems), you need to know fast so that you can adapt, change, and try again.
Eventually, you’ll get the “market / message” match right and your business will soar.
Next In The Entrepreneurship 101 Series: The Value of Relationship In Your Business
Enjoy the Search!
-Dan
Photo by: Scarlet_rose
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