Sales and Marketing that Work

Here is the truth most of us don’t want to hear: Without marketing and sales, there is no business. We don’t want to hear that, although most of us believe it, because performing marketing and sales tasks is scary. We have to communicate with other people. That’s what we do when we market our business and sell our products and services. Sometimes we do it by telephone (telemarketing). Sometimes we do it using mail (direct mail). Sometimes we use newspapers and magazines to tell our story (public relations). Sometimes we buy space in publications or online (advertising). And sometimes we use online tools (web sites, blogs, podcasts).

Marketing gets the word out about our business. It gets us noticed. It gets customers in our doors. It is the step that leads to sales, when a customer buys our products and services. If we don’t get noticed, and sell our products and services, there is no business.

Done the right way—with complete honesty and integrity—those who work in sales and marketing strive to increase happiness by making sure that the business creates products and deliver services that meet people’s needs. Everyone involved in the business should treat all people with respect and dignity, and talks with their current and potential customers, not at them. Versions of the truth are unacceptable. Communication is black or white and honest or dishonest. When done correctly, sales and marketing tasks are meant to educate, inform and reach out to certain people (our market) with news and information that people need to know about your business.

Here is the bottom line: Sales and marketing care about people and their needs and shares the information people need to make good choices in their lives. This is what we define as leading with the heart and creating happiness.

Think about it: If we are to manage a business for success, we have to create a business built around sales, marketing and innovation. In other words, sales, marketing and innovation are the most fundamental and most important tasks in our business. Every person in our business has some responsibility for sales and marketing results, and their pay should be tied to those results. It doesn’t matter whether or not the employee is in the accounting department or the marketing department. Every time we communicate with a customer, we are performing a marketing and a sales task.

CSO Insights' Sales Performance Optimization—2007 Survey Results and Analysis for the most current sales performance benchmarks provides data that tells us we are not doing great work in sales and marketing:

• Only 60% of sales reps are making or exceeding quotas.
• Only 37% of firms report they have implemented a formal sales process.
• 85% of those who do have a formal sales process report it has a positive impact on sales performance.

The first two numbers represent failure; however, the good news lies in the third number, which gives us a great clue as to how to solve the challenge.

Change the Face of Sales and Marketing

We can increase marketing and sales performance in several ways:

• Sales and marketing staffs should be in one department and should work closely together on every step of the process, from understanding the customers, to strategic marketing and sales planning, to closing sales.
• Traditional sales compensation packages should reflect bottom lines and margins, and sales staff pay should be tied directly to the average margins achieved through their sales. Today, sales are usually passed based on the revenues they bring in, which encourage discounting and lower margins.
• Sales’ first goal should be to provide solutions rather than to sell a product or a service.
• Sales and marketing people should never promise anything that the business cannot deliver.
• Sales should be part of ongoing customer service and customer satisfaction. Working with the marketing staff, sales should keep in touch with their customers.

Here are some of the keys to a successful integrated sales and marketing campaign:

• Target your market based on the behaviors, emotions, demographics, psychographics, and specific wants, needs and desires of those key customers who want your product or service.
• People choose products that work for them: those products that resonate emotionally and have personal meaning.
• The key to sales and marketing is to connect our products and services with people wants, needs and desires so that they tickle people’s emotional and personal touch points.
• Know as much about the who within your audience as possible.
• What elicits the emotional, psychological and intellectual responses that motivate that audience to buy from us and to build a sustainable relationship with us?
• What will make your customers and clients happy?
• We must differentiate our customers and recognize that they are individuals who can be segmented into large audiences but only if we understand what their needs are, what their buying potential represents and how they rank based on a scale that identifies their long-term value to you and your long-term value to them. Segment your audience by buying habits and purchasing behaviors.
• Rank customers by their value, from 1—meaning extremely likely to buy and to buy often—to 5—meaning, they wouldn’t buy from us if we were the only game in town or they buy products for rebates, only to return the product one the rebate check is cashed.
• Sales and marketing success is directly proportional to understanding customer needs, serving those needs, establishing relationships based on trust and credibility, and building, implementing and managing happiness.

If you focus on the who instead of the what and develop an integrated campaign, your response rates will deliver return on your investment.