Don’t Confuse Marketing with Selling
This month’s Fortune magazine has an article about how to manage your business in a recession. Like many other
articles, the writer mentions the importance of investing in marketing. “Kohl’s, the big retailer, actually spent more on marketing this past holiday season than it did last year,” writes Geoff Colvin. We’ve received several inquiries from CEOs of small and midsized companies that want to talk about implementing a marketing program to increase revenues. My first question back to them is usually a surprise. I want to know about their sales team.
- Do you have a strong sales leader?
- Do you have an established sales process?
- Do you track your pipeline?
- How many people sell in your company?
- Do you have a mix of hunters and farmers?
It’s not that we’re trying to be difficult. We just don’t want to waste your money and our time. If you don’t have a good sales team, a clear sales process, and a system to process leads through your pipeline, then spending money on marketing is going to be a waste. No deal was ever lost because a sales person didn’t have the right brochure. And (to my knowledge), no deal was ever won because the buyer saw a data sheet and yelled, “Holy smokes, lets go buy this product based on how great this data sheet looks!” (Although this would be really cool if it did happen.)
Landscaping & Websites
Imagine building a home, meeting with the architect and having that first conversation about your dreams and goals for the house. Then the architect returns with some plans for you to review. You open the drawings and what he’s rendered is the complete landscaping design for your entire property.
“What about the house?” you ask. “What about the bedrooms, the kitchen, how the structure is built? What about how we’ll use the house, the materials and content we want inside the house? What about all that?”
The architect looks at you and waves his hand. “Oh, we’ll get to all that stuff later, but look at these great bushes I want to plant up your driveway. Are they cool or what!!??” At this point, you are probably going to bean the architect and go find someone else a little more qualified.
Every day I see this scenario played out with business websites. The first concern is always about the look of the site, the graphics, the pictures. All the landscaping. But what about your structure? Your information architecture? What thought have you given to how people will use the site, how you’ll track performance, and give the visitors to your site the experience and information they need to move forward in the buying cycle? Read more
