The Yin & Yang of
Marketing & Sales—Part II
NoSpin Debunker
#40: March 18, 2002
Please take the new NoSpin Poll:
How would you
characterize your company's (or most recent company's) balance between Marketing
& Sales?
We are a “feet-on-the-street”
sales company and depend on “relationships” to get business. What’s the point of
“Marketing?
For many small and
medium-sized businesses, relying on “feet-on-the-street” and “relationships” is
their singular marketing and sales approach. They use individual sales people
who leverage personal and business relationships and the contacts of top
managers to find customers and create sales. Unquestionably, many of those
companies survive and some do very well with this approach. If, though, you
would like to grow your business and sell more products and services faster—and
at a profit, you might want to read on.
For all you duck hunters
Last week in Part I we
talked about the difference between Marketing and Sales to set the stage for
this series of Debunkers. I don’t hunt ducks, but I like this analogy that Jack Varney, President of Aftermath, Inc
(a management consulting firm in Batavia, OH) emailed me to describe the
difference between marketing and sales:
“In
duck hunting, the marketing person will find the right spot where ducks are then
sit and call the ducks into the blind.
The sales person sees the duck coming in and hopefully shoots the
duck. Without the marketing
person finding the right spot and delivering the correct message the sales
person does not have a shot and there is no dinner.”
If you don’t continuously sell via your relationships, you are missing THE premier sales opportunity. If you’ve produced for others in the past (either as a colleague, employee, or vendor), you have credibility, there’s less risk, and it takes a lot less time to make a sale—or to help get entrée to a “new” prospect. There’s nothing quite as effective as leveraging your past and current business relationships to find and create new business.
A lot of products are sold directly via catalogues, the web, Infomercials, retail, etc—without any or much help from sales people. But “feet-on-street” sales (in person and/or by phone) are almost essential in most small and medium-sized businesses, especially those that sell B2B services (e.g. “solutions”—although I hate that word), software, and complex and/or higher priced products.
Sales cycles often last 3 months, 6 months, and even longer to get that final close. Quality feet-on-the-street folks are critical to getting that business signed on the dotted line. Just last week, a CRM Magazine article noted that more companies doing smaller pilot projects instead of eating the elephant both from a services and a product standpoint. What this means is that sales people are going to incur increased sales cycles to close that BIG opportunity.
Use those relationships and contacts (and contacts of contacts), work them hard, stay in touch, follow-up—and this approach will keep bringing in business—but works A LOT better in tandem with “marketing.”
If you rely exclusively—or too heavily--on relationships and feet-on-the-street, you are limiting the success of your business. Eventually, sooner than later you will hit a wall. Most businesses that rely on “feet-on-the-street” are in their comfort zone for getting some level of business from their immediate, geographic area (or in some instances the whole US and beyond) and contacts. But these companies are going to be hamstrung in having any ability to expand that prospect base and step to the next level.
While there is less risk in relying on the marketing/sales model of predominantly hiring people with "THE RIGHT" contacts, there is still risk because individual contacts lists are finite. Any what happens when that one or two sales people who have all the great personal contacts leave, and leave with their contacts? You’re in trouble—and non-competes are a waste of time. A key Marketing role is to increase the quality and quantity of the overall contact/prospect list on an ongoing basis.
Playing golf with former cronies and contacts, taking them to dinner or lunch or a ballgame or otherwise wining and dining them is not only fun but does offer good opportunities to remind them that you’re still alive—and to move a prospect up the sales funnel. But such one-on-one work is very time consuming and still a crapshoot as to what will happen when. It’s tough to leverage that time on the links across many prospects.
Perhaps the biggest myth of predominantly relying on feet-on-the street and relationships is that you’re all doing a good job of staying top-of-mind with enough prospects to grow your company at a good pace. Typically, you’re not. Playing golf once or twice a year with a few contacts is fine, but doesn’t grow companies.
Can you handle the Truth?
Here’s the NoSpin on this important topic. The tendency for many businesses, in particular, young, small and medium-sized businesses, is to cut corners—understandably, perhaps—when it comes to Marketing. Many do “it” backwards: with little thought to matching products and services (including packaging/pricing) with market need, minimal target market analysis and prioritization of potential accounts, rudimentary and inconsistent messaging, and marginal application of the right marketing vehicles at any reasonable frequency, and haphazard follow-up, if any.
Instead, too many first companies hire a “sales” person or “business development” person (or people)--and then these people scurry around, individually, trying to dig up and close business—primarily based on their past relationships and contacts. If that person or people is skilled in sales, business unquestionably, gets closed—and sometimes a lot of business—at least for a period of time.
“Marketing” (frequently a meaningless addendum to one of the Sales people’s titles) is hit and miss, at most. Some of these companies completely pooh-pooh the whole notion of Marketing and many more fool themselves that they are doing “real” Marketing by merely putting that word on someone’s business card--and then just assuming that IT will happen.
Here are just a few of the things that happen in this all-too-common scenario:
ü Any marketing dollars that are allocated are spent are spent willy-nilly with little coordinated thought to strategy and tactics.
ü Expectations call for immediate results—usually impossible.
ü Stuff (maybe a 4-color brochure, a trade show booth, newsletter, etc) gets produced but doesn’t hang together—and doesn’t really help sell.
ü There’s a company web site that is mainly a dated brochure and yellow pages online—and no, it doesn’t help create any sales.
ü Messages are fuzzy, conflicting, and just not very consistent--everyone’s telling a different story
ü Presentations and proposals are as individual as the sales people and not very professional.
ü If there’s any database of prospects and leads, it’s in pieces on multiple people’s PC’s, out-of-date and generally a mess.
ü Follow-up on prospects are generated becomes a joke—no one’s in charge.
ü If a “marketing” person is hired, he or she is very junior and relegated to second-class citizen status right off the bat.
ü Huge opportunities are missed because a lot of potential prospects were never part of your Sales contacts and relationships.
Where’s that Yin and Yang
balance for your Marketing & Sales?
In general, if the approach is to rely on the relationships of “feet-on-the-street,” things start falling through the cracks until something breaks: those really aggressive sales numbers just can’t be hit any more with the same old approach, a customer(s) isn’t very happy, a really good sales person doing double or triple duty (e.g. trying to manage the marketing function, manage sales, and sell) burns out and leaves, sales drop, key employees get cut, and then it’s really hard to find new ones, and the company’s in trouble and/or looking for investment dollars again.
Because of incompetence? Not necessarily. But rather because the balance between the Yin and Yang of Marketing and Sales been out of kilter since the beginning. So then, is then answer to simplistically, concentrate almost exclusively on Marketing at the expense of “feet-on-the-street” sales? Of course not, but it is finding an appropriate balance between marketing and sales that may wax and wane and change over time. In the next Yin &Yang debunkers Jack Varney and I will talk more about that balance—starting with ways to better organize your sales and marketing functions.
Let me know what YOU think about this debunker!
If you would prefer to be removed from this email list, let me know.
Tom Ranseen
NoSpin Marketing
615.383.7157