Having previously covered social media (The Marketing Master Class – Social Media for Business), Kimberly Davis kindly invited me along to the third in her Marketing Masters Series. And this time the topic was Linking Marketing and Sales.
Kimberly started with a very simple definition; Marketing is anything that represents your company.
Marketing vs Sales
– example of a football team – team is the marketing effort – the striker is the sales
– Better if different people due to different goals
o Marketing – long term – brand building – consistency – impersonal
o Sales – short term – translates interest into a sale – personal (one to one)
Fear of sales
– If your product is good, you are doing them a favour by telling them about it.
– It’s is just a conversation – not a sales pitch
– People buy from people they know, like and trust
Company name
– You should be able to say what you do in two words
– Forget witty tag lines that say nothing
– Example – Campbell’s condensed soup – Sasparilla marketing detoxification
Target market
– Forget your gut instinct – you can’t sell to everybody
– Who is your ideal customer?
– Create a profile for them – age, race, interests, position, salary etc
Selling the right thing
– What is going to make you the most ROI (return on investment)?
– Are you selling the right thing to the right people?
Identifying need
– Where does it hurt for your customers?
– Solve a problem
– People buy what they want, not what they need.
Focus on the benefits
– What are your benefits?
– What problem can you solve?
– How can you make their life easier?
Unique Selling Point
– What are you USP’s?
– Be ‘the only …’
– Focus – If you try to be everything to everyone, you will be nothing to no one
The Elevator Pitch
– It is the most important thing in your marketing strategy.
– You have twenty seconds to make an impact.
– Can you clearly articulate what you do in that time?
– People will decide whether to file or forget you based on this.
– No more that two short sentences long.
o Who, what, why when and how?
Communication
– Find the right words to use
– Keep it simple
– Focus on fears and needs
– Read it out and hear how it sounds
– Test it on lots of people and get feedback
– Ask them to say it back to you to see what they remember
Kimberly’s elevator pitch for Sarsaparilla:
50% of marketing is wasted. Sarsaparilla is a marketing consulting and training agency that specialises in marketing purification – the process of detoxing your marketing, protecting you from The Flash, Fluff and Fakers, and helping you make more money with less.
- Sales across the Marketing Umbrella
- Branding
- Business cards
- Literature
- Social Media
.com - Merchandise
- Eshots, flyers, emails etc
- Website
- Testimonials
- Advertising
PR
– Getting other people to say it for you
Networking
– Time to use your elevator speech
– How to get in out of a conversation – ‘I don’t want to keep you from networking with other people here’… Don’t be too obvious
– Business Cards
– Carry a nice pen – cheap pen = cheap company
– Think beyond the person in front of you – they may know someone relevant
– Ask for what you want – they may be able to help
– Pay if forward
– 5 minutes per person
Ways to measure your return on marketing investment
– Take an inventory
o List of clients and what they buy from you
o Review you client profile
How many
Average spend
Repeat clients?
Their profile – hobbies, interests etc
When they buy
Why they buy
Survey with SurveyMonkey
o Do your market research – not with family and friends
o Gives you a starting point for measurement
- Creating a process (funnel?)
- Positioning
- Permission Marketing
- Incentivise your customers
- Data capture
- Generating new leads
- Ask why people aren’t buying
- Cost of customer acquisition
- Retention / Customer service
- Multiple revenue streams
- Reminders
- Experiential marketing
Pricing
Referral and Affiliate plans
Stop selling and allow people to buy from you
Find a mentor
A Hobby or a Business?
Sharon Wright and Magnamole
Kimberly’s keynote speaker for the final slot of the day was Sharon Wright, who’s claim to fame is delivering the best pitch in the history of Dragons Den.
– Took one day off in the first year of developing the idea.
– Single parent entrepreneur
– ‘Think big and you will be big’
– Decided to start with the biggest BT
o 2 hours of negativity
o 6 Sigma proof required
o Would be virtually impossible
o Had never been done before
o One positive – the product had legs
– First paying customer was with Cromwell tools – told them BT was a buy (a bit cheeky)
– From creation to market within 6 months
– Strong self belief is 1st important ingredient for business success
– Aim was to be the best presenter on Dragons Den – achieved this goal
– Preparation (2nd key ingredient for business success)
– Practiced her three minute pitch 100 times a day for three weeks
– Read all of the Dragon’s books to help choose which partner to go with
– After the show was aired Sharon received 7,000 emails
– Was now working 22 hours a day, seven days a week.
– Loneliness of starting a business (3rd key ingredient)
– As time went on her self belief began to drop
– Met Tony Larkin at the British Inventors show who offered to invest in her
– Sharon has now sold her Magnamole to an American company keeping a 10% holding.
– The most important lesson learnt was to trust her instincts, and get a business mentor. You are often too emotionally close to your business to make objective business decisions.
– Story reminds me of one of my earliest blog posts on Dragons Den
Dragon’s Con.
Sharon’s book ‘Mother of Invention – How I won Dragons Den, Lost my mind, Nearly lost my business and ended up reinventing myself’, tells of her personal struggle as a single mother, inventor and entrepreneur.
It has been reviewed on my colleague Steve Van Dulken’s Patent Search Blog.