MARKETING GENERATES, SALES CONVERTS
Sales and marketing are two very different activities and should never be confused or combined. Getting customers to know about you is one of the single toughest things for entrepreneurs to get right. This is why you need marketing. Effective marketing should generate new business leads.
With a firm new business lead, your sales effort becomes paramount. Successful selling sees the conversion of leads into customers. This is how you measure your sales efforts: the number of leads that become your customers.
How do I make sure new leads translate into sales?
Align marketing and sales and tell a great story
Marketing and selling are both sciences. Each compromise different activities which should be organised by the the entrepreneur into a sequence, and then set up as two systems that can be measured. Marketing and sales should never be built on the back of a personality because one person’s individual style can never be replicated.
An effective marketing effort creates an expectation with a potential customer about what they can expect from your business. In turn an effective sales effort should create a unique experience that builds trust and cements a relationship based on belief that the expectation generated by marketing will be met.
Converting leads to sales
Translating leads into sales is informed by tow core systems that must be set up in the business first.
Organise each lead generating activity into a sequence
Multiple activities should be driving leads all the time (emails, direct selling, cold calling etc) with each activity organised into a logical sequence that can be measured. For example, sending a promotional email to a database involves:
- constructing the email
- preparing the database
- dispatching the mail and
- recording the number of responses to measure the impact.
Create a selling system based on your unique offering
Selling is less about a great personality and more about creating a compelling experience for the enquirer. This experience is informed by what makes your business special and what differentiates it from others in the same industry. Selling completes the story started during marketing when the anticipation is formed is its the encounter that wins the customer over to your business.
