Three interlinked activities to create a winning sales system.
“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It was true when quipped around 1770. There were few products, and if you made something reasonable, customers did exactly that!
Today, every product or service is a commodity. There are thousands of providers and hundreds of thousands globally.
Now, the adage should be: “If you have a mousetrap, you need to beat a path to your customer’s door.”
So, what are your options?
There are three strategies that you need to have in play: fishing, hunting, and farming. You need to do them all if you wish to maintain your market share and grow.
In this podcast of the Money Show Pavlo Phitidis unpacks, “FISHING, FARMING & HUNTING” in a business context.
Fishing
There are two primary fishing strategies used in industry today.
- Net trawling: You pull a huge net behind a boat out in the open sea. It is indiscriminate and random enough that it catches anything and everything in its path.
- Lure trolling: The species of fish you want to catch determines where you go trolling and what lures you use.
In your business, you should use both strategies. Your content is oriented around your company’s successes, failures, thoughts, and views on the industry’s future.
Your net trawling would be your social media posts that talk about achievements, successes, and failures that you have gained. They are unpaid and might be seen by anyone and everyone, depending on the content and virality of the post. Their purpose should be to create awareness of your company and build brand and familiarity.
Your lure trolling is more targeted. For example, if you offer products aimed at solving problems in the restaurant industry, you could post your marketing content into a restaurant owners’ group on the social platform you can access. It is more targeted but still a hit-and-miss affair. The purpose is to create awareness and build familiarity.
Hunting
Sticking to the fishing analogy, hunting is the equivalent of spearfishing. This is a very physical activity and requires you to dive under the water and actively seek out the fish you want to catch.
In your business, you actively go right to the source of your target, your customer. It means you need to know who buys your product, why they buy it, and where and when they buy it.
Farming
Again, using the fishing analogy, farming is where you identify a group of fish, hold them in a dam or lake, and feed them to fatten them up until they are ready.
In your business, this is the process of nurturing the customers you have engaged with, building relationships, creating familiarity, deepening education, and maturing them to the point where they are ready to transact and do a deal.
The three strategies work together to find, win, and hold customers—the essence of any business.
Turning this analogy into a system of marketing and sales is our job as business owners.
Led by your customer’s buying journey, which entails three broad stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision, you will use marketing (net fishing and farming), business development (lure fishing and farming), and sales (hunting).
The job of marketing is to:
- Reach stakeholders in your company’s success: future customers, suppliers, and employees
- Define you’re positioning in terms of the segments of customers you want to reach
- Elicited intrigue, curiosity, and interest from a broad audience but focused on the leads that fit your business
- The measure of success is a lead that is familiar with your brand.
The job of business development is to:
- Generate a lead and build a relationship
- Elicit needs and wants and educate the lead, which will encourage them to engage further by closing the gap between the lead’s problem and your product as a solution.
- Raise and resolve objections
- The measure of success is a customer, educated and informed, who wants to buy.
The job of sales is to:
- Receive a lead and close the deal
- Close the gap between the customer’s problem and your product as a solution.
- Manage and resolve objections
- The measure of success is a transaction and payment.
All three play into and across each other as a system of finding, winning, and holding customers. It is what sets the winners apart.