Tomicide Solutions, December 2011

15 Ways Marketing Can Support Your Sales Success

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Synopsis

Just as suicide bombing has become popular in recent years to draw attention and cause horrific damage to both life and property, forced selling in the IT industry without due marketing has also gained popularity, based on the false notion that marketing is a waste of money, and the secret to higher sales is just hiring higher number of more aggressive salespeople who are willing to go through concrete walls to meet buyers.

But it has turned out to be a big belly flop, and as a result of that retarded approach, most IT companies are forced to compete on price as replaceable vendors. The status of the respected industrial authority, even if it's ever existed, is dead and gone.

So, IT companies either carry on competing on price and duking it out in bidding wars, responding to RFPs, or pull their stubborn heads out of their arses, realise that times have changed, and start changing with the times.

Podcast: MP3 Version

In the movie The Last Samurai, the final battle was between the samurais and the emperor's army. Both armies were both quipped and trained very well.

So, how come the emperor's army won by a landslide, wiping out all the samurais?

The emperor's army was well equipped relative to the current development of armoury and military strategy. The samurais were well equipped relative to an age that no longer existed. They were doomed right from the beginning.

And now imagine this situation in your own business. Your salespeople are the samurais, and buyers are the emperor's army.

Your salespeople try hard to penetrate your buyers' defences, but they can't because buyers keep firing at your salespeople using modern weapons, like voice mail, RFPs, gatekeepers, "No Solicitors" signs, very high concrete walls or even the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog[1]

And your salespeople are falling like the samurais in the movie.

Yes, you can hire more salespeople to replace the "fallen" ones who, after collecting some nasty battle wounds, have left your company, but soon the world runs out of brave salespeople with glutton for punishment, and you fall flat on your arse.

What happens then?

Or you can also look at Bjorn Borg's story...

After a spectacular career, in 1983, he retired from professional tennis. And then in the early-1990s, he decided to return.

Ignoring the advancements in racket technology, he returned with a wooden racket in an age when everyone played with modern graphite rackets.

And everyone beat him like a double-bottomed drum. He was still a better player than most, but he was using the wrong tool.

So, the modern tool was available, but his sense of invincibility kept him losing. He was equipped with a racket whose age had long gone.

So, what is the lesson in Borg's story?

The rules of the game had changed, but Borg tried to use a tool that was excellent under different rules but totally useless under the new ones.

For IT businesses, many years ago it was enough to assemble massive sales forces, chuck them out on the streets and have them roam the land and visit prospective clients with cups of coffee and boxes of doughnuts. That was an age, when buyers were willing to talk to salespeople and consume all the free goodies.

But that age is dead and gone. Buyers do their level best to avoid salespeople, and no amount of doughnuts can convince them to meet salespeople.

So, sellers, instead of just having armies of salespeople roam the land, have to resort to some smart methods to gain an audience with buyers.

And that approach is marketing, but not the traditional institutional image marketing that big companies tend to use, wasting billions of dollars year in and year out.

As per copywriting legend, the late Gary Halbert, big companies' agenda for marketing and advertising can be summarised in a few points...

And after all those things have been accomplished, maybe, to sell something.

Sadly, so many smaller organisations try to emulate this behemoth strategy.

Hopefully, your agenda for marketing and advertising is to sell your stuff. What else would it be?

What your salespeople need is not more and harsher threatening, coercing, cajoling but better marketing to bring qualified buyers to them.

When you have a good marketing turbocharger attached to your sales engine, then even your mediocre salespeople can perform miracles. You no longer have to tolerate demanding superstars and prima donnas.

And what happens if they leave you and go to the competition?

Nothing. Not a sausage.

A mediocre sales force supported by good marketing will always outperform a superstar sales force without marketing support.

This is why...

Due to good marketing, the mediocre sales force can position itself as respected experts, so the best buyers want to meet them.

But a superstar sales force without marketing support is perceived as a bunch of commission-hungry street-peddlers and bazaar hucksters. And buyers will avoid them like the plague.

Salespeople don't need motivation or sales contests. What they need is effective marketing, which will bring quality buyers to them. No more chasing, begging for appointments and pleading for purchase orders.

So, let's see how your marketing can help your salespeople to perform better...


1. Marketing cuts a clear path between your company and your target market. As a result, by the time your salespeople contact their prospects, they are pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre?qualified, and pre?disposed to do business with your company.

No, it's not a guaranteed sale, but prospects are willing to sit down and have discussions with your salespeople on a mutually beneficial basis, and the interactions between buyers and sellers don't escalate to antagonistic pissing contests.


2. Marketing can connect you with real buyers. Most decision-makers instantly relegate salespeople to procurement agents who have one single focus: Find the lowest bidder for every purchase and twist their arms for special terms and conditions.

Unlike in government where bureaucrats who lose their budgets unless they waste them to the last penny, when procurement agents save their budgets, they get praised to high heavens, get bonuses and get promoted.

Even if the products and services of lowest bidders make a mess of the area of the business that they are supposed to improve, purchasing agents are still praised for saving money.


3. Marketing creates a consistent framework for selling. There is no more flying by the seats of salespeople's pants. No more "winging it". Yes, there is room for some improvisation but there is absolutely no room for winging.

There is a difference between improvisation and winging. Improvisation is winging within pre-agreed boundaries. Winging is just some random actions.

With good marketing in place, salespeople don't even try to meet buyers until and unless buyers have jumped through the necessary qualifying hoops and qualify for live meetings.

This approach makes the process fairly consistent and predictable.


4. Good marketing creates a kind of attractive buzz on the market. After each good campaign, the market's interest increases for your merchandise and it's resistance for your high fees and prices decreases.

Just think about how the Internet marketing gurus make some pretty penny without managing expensive sales forces. They market so well that people buy their stuff without sales forces.


5. Good marketing is a buyer selector. It makes certain that only Perfect Client calibre prospects contact you in the first place and others don't waste your time.

You can have a client roster that you're proud of. Every day, you look forward to working with any of your clients. And your clients are happy to work with you and pay your fees and prices without haggling or complaining.


6. Marketing educates new salespeople about the sales process. In many IT companies, salespeople have to figure out how to do their jobs. Actually, the sales team is a misnomer. In most sales teams, team members would cut each other's throats for the other person's commissions.

With marketing in place, each salesperson learns the same thing about the company, its products and services and the target market, so salespeople can sing the same song, in the same key and from the same song sheet.


7. Marketing equips salespeople with the right sales tools. This is the other side of consistency. Since salespeople are no longer winging their actions, they can be consistent relative both to their companies' objectives and to each other.


8. Marketing can properly launch new products/services. This approach makes it possible that by the time salespeople meet buyers, buyers are already aware of the new products/services. Furthermore, buyers have already expressed interest in them.

Without marketing, products/services merely show up in our lives, and we have no idea how to handle them. Marketing provides a kind of theatre to launch new merchandise. Without this theatre no one pays attention.


9. Marketing keeps in touch with existing clients and less sales-ready prospects. Salespeople want to focus on prospects who are likely to become clients very soon. They don't have time to stay in touch with hundreds or even thousands of prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

So, marketing can automate this process, and nurture the less sales-ready prospects.

According to Hubspot's research (How to Use Lead Nurturing for Smarter Marketing by Magdalena Georgieva), nurtured emails get 4-10 times higher response than standalone email offers.

Gleanster Research estimates that 50% of all leads are qualified to buy, but are not ready yet. If you force them to make buying decisions, they leave you forever.


10. Marketing can stay in touch even with small "fry" prospects. While salespeople go after juicy opportunities, marketing can take care of "small fry" and less likely prospects who are either not ready to buy yet or likely to buy "small items".

But even small items are items, and since the keep-in-touch process is automated, it doesn't make a dickybird of a difference how many prospects you are in touch with. Somehow, the more the merrier.


11. Marketing can hang in until a definite decision. We know from studies that it can take 5+ contacts to convert a prospect to a buyer. While salespeople bail out after 2-3 contacts, marketing, since it's automated, stays in all the way, until the prospects makes a definite decision.

No, we don't want to pester prospects to death. We just stay in touch with them using information that is valuable to them. Instead of sending out yet another sales pitch about your specially discounted antivirus programme, send a guide on the "Art And Science Of Selecting The Right Antivirus Programme".

And when the time is right, more people will buy your programme... without one penny discount.


12. Marketing liberates salespeople from repetitive grunt work. While staying in touch is vital, because it's repetitive grunt work, it should never be put on the shoulders of salespeople, expecting them to do it manually.

Also, manual work means more inconsistencies. Just keep a small sales force, so it can focus on ripened prospects that now need personal attention because they are so close to making their buying decisions.

Using lovemaking lingo, marketing should perform the foreplay on autopilot, and sales should perform the act itself in person. And no salesperson should get involved until prospects have clearly demonstrated that they've had enough foreplay, and now are ready for the main course.

But while this approach works in business, don't try this with your spouse. You may get dumped pretty swiftly.


13. Marketing can reach tens of thousands of prospects. While marketing can do the nurturing work on a virtually unlimited number of prospects, salespeople's capacity is limited.

Yes, some sales trainers say, you should hire more salespeople, but that's retarded. Even salespeople on straight commission, which I don't recommend anyway, cost money for the company.

And the larger your sales force is, the smaller productivity (sales per person) you can expect. No amount of salespeople can do what an automated marketing programme can do for you.


14. Marketing allows you to infiltrate new markets. Yes, a sales force can do that too, but at what price? It's like cutting down a tree with a nail file. Yes, it's doable, but it's idiotic.

It takes only two weeks to craft a good direct mail piece and send it to 10,000 people. How big of a sales force and how much time would it take to visit 10,000 people, considering that at least 9,990 would do their best to avoid your salespeople like the plague?


15. Marketing puts weight behind your business. Without marketing a business is not really a business but really a glorified hobby. Yes, many business owners argue about this issue, but it's all futile.

Neither the marketplace nor the industry takes seriously a business without marketing. Some people say, good products and services don't need marketing. Maybe. But if you look closer, then you see that Apple, Ferrari and all the other good companies do marketing. I wonder why.

Summary

As Peter Drucker put it many years ago...

"There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product and service fits him and sells itself."

This statement has been becoming truer year after year, although sales trainers, with a vested interest in sales training, rebel against it, and insist on companies' running massive sales forces.

It reminds me of the dairy industry that insists that milk is one of the best sources of calcium and dairy products must be included - in rather large quantities - in our daily meals.

A few years ago, in one of Bob Bly's emails I read a sales trainer's snarly comment to information marketers...

"Marketing is for people who can't sell.

Then Bob also mentions that this sales trainer's bread-and-butter business is teaching salespeople cold-calling.

He is the proverbial dairy farmer who insists that milk is a great source of calcium.

Basically he teaches salespeople how to interrupt strangers who try to avoid them like the plague. Then how to trick them into listening to a total stranger's sales pitches about products and services which these interrupted people neither want nor need.

The essence of traditional sales is to proactively seek people out and bombard them with sales pitches into submission and then take their money and run very far and very fast.

Have you noticed that sales-heavy companies usually have shitty customer service? They just want to hawk their stuff and then quickly move on to the next victims.

Good marketing is about having self-selected people come to you on their own volition and buy your products/services. There is no force.

Selling is about convincing. Marketing is about compelling.

Good warriors make the enemy come to them. Who comes to you has a force of emptiness, and you have a force of fullness. Attacking emptiness with fullness is always a great idea.

Just think about it...

Long-term military records indicate that a modern army scores one enemy fatality for every 15,000 combat rounds expended by its infantry.

For snipers, the result is one fatality for every 1.2 expended rounds.

That's a 12,500-fold improvement.

Do you see why the military is willing to spend a small fortune to train snipers?

The main army operates on emptiness: Chasing after the enemy.

Snipers operate on fullness: Having the enemy come to them.

No, don't kill your prospects, but see the difference in the approach.

Also, think about what aggressive selling would do to your market positioning? It would ruin it, and sooner or later the market would laugh at you, saying...

Case in point: Would you go to a Rolling Stones concert if someone on the other end of the phone introduced himself as Mick Jagger, and tried to sell you a ticket?

I reckon, anyone above the intelligence level of a stink bug with advanced Alzheimer's, would smell the rat in the situation.

Am I saying that sales trainers have their intelligence levels below that of the stink bug with advanced Alzheimer's?

Not necessarily. They are just trying to sell their existing expertise even though its time is dead and gone. No surprise here.

Hey, I've seen a good number of stores selling Walkmans.

And I have certainly seen lots of people buy gallons of milk because they think milk is a great source of calcium. They should read Dr. Joseph Mercola, and get their beliefs sorted out.

So, after dickybirds, Mick Jagger, stink bugs and milk, it's time to end this masterpiece, wish you a happy new year and buzz off until next month.

So, I'll do that.

Happy new year!

[1] A fictional beast in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Continue where you've left off...

Podcast sound effect at 04:28: "Chopped to pieces, Ripped to shreds, You're gonna wish that you were dead!" From Midget Saw by Alestorm

Podcast sound effect at 22:43: "Hey! you're banjaxed! Hey! you're screwed! And death is coming for you! Trapped on an island lost at sea! Shipwrecked you'll cease to be!" From Shipwrecked by Alestorm

Come and let's discuss this newsletter issue on my blog...

Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.