Marketing is best represented as a broad continuum. It extends from understanding a company's core competencies and developing a product plan to rolling that product out and supporting its sale - and then doing it all over again. Volumes have been written about the many aspects of marketing. Here, though, are our little tidbits that focus just beyond product marketing, into the space that connects marketing with the selling process.

1. It's All About Momentum
2. The Wall of Sound
3. Offer People Something
4. Map It to the Selling Process
5. The Phased Approach
6. Life's A Test
7. Don't Create Too Much Demand
8. Keep It Clear, S-----
9. The 60/12 Rule
10. You've Got To Have Passion

 
1. It's All About Momentum
All too often, companies attempt to support their sales operations by applying the "dabble theory" of marketing. Let's drop a mailing or let's place an ad, and see how it does. The truth is these small efforts don't usually make much of a difference and tend to be more a waste of money and resources than anything else.

Marketing is all about momentum building. Once a company begins to build a head of steam in the marketplace, that momentum starts to have a life of its own and begins to multiply in so many wonderful ways. Sales people get pumped. Employees get excited and work extra hard. Prospects want to know more and start to appear almost out of thin air. The buzz starts to increase. The press calls you. Marketing programs are consistently successful. And life seems pretty good.

Well, how does all this happen? Is it just a dream? Step #1, it helps to have a good product, otherwise why bother? Step #2, you've got to let people know about it.

Letting the market know takes some smarts. There's a lot of noise out there in the marketplace. How do you compete with all that? Simple. As Phil Spector might have once said, "It's time to apply The Wall of Sound."

2. The Wall of Sound
This is just another way to describe the much-maligned concept of integrated marketing. Rather than dribble out a marketing program here and then there, queue it all up together and go out with some noise of your own. If it's well coordinated, it can work every time. But it's important to find your right time.

Pick a significant newsworthy event in the life of the company - the introduction of your company, a major new product release, an important new version, a new strategic relationship, a new corporate initiative. You get the idea. And then work hard to surround that event, before, during and after, with all the marketing force you can muster, making sure that all the pieces work in concert with one another.

Hit the streets to queue up the industry analysts. Then take your message to the press. When the coverage begins to hit, launch your direct marketing programs, be it by mail or in ads. Launch your Web promotions. Time it just on the heals of an important trade show or conference appearance. Follow it up with telemarketing.

Make it all happen in concert. In the end, the whole becomes much greater than the sum of the parts. The key is to try to appear more than once on people's radar screens in an effort to get some mindshare. And ultimately, you will have maximized the value of every dollar spent on marketing your company and its products.

3. Offer People Something
We have yet to meet a small company (or, for that matter, a not-so-small company) that can afford to spend money for no noticeable return on investment. Still, take a minute to flip through any industry's trade magazine and notice the waste.

Too often, you will find some creative advertisement intended to get your attention. Yet there's no discernible call to action. Before you launch into any marketing campaigns, be sure that there is a next logical step you want people to take. Although demos of products seem to work fine as potential offers, some of the best things we've seen are much less sales oriented and much more educationally oriented and useful to a prospect.

Rather than having someone send for more product information, offer them an industry report by a well-respected expert in the field, or an executive overview on information related to your area of expertise, or some in-depth study or white paper on issues in your industry. Make the offer significant and have it stand out in your communications. These always end up being excellent draws for a higher quality crowd. (And above all else, stay clear of t-shirts and hats.)

Then once you have fulfilled these requests, be sure to include an obvious next step for prospects so they can continue down the path towards sales. If you take a thoughtful approach to building this process, your prospects will emerge much smarter, asking the right questions and they will be that much closer to a buying decision, which is exactly where your sales team wants them.

4. Map It to the Selling Process
Marketing, in particular awareness creation and demand generation, should always be viewed as an integral part of the selling process. Its objective should be to shorten the involvement of the sales team and aid in closing a sale quicker. If Marketing does its job properly, with prospects moving into the hands of sales clear-headed and well-educated, then the entire sales process becomes a model on which to map out an integrated marketing effort.

On one side are all the various outbound marketing programs - advertising, public relations, trade shows, direct mail, etc. - intended to draw prospects into the sales/marketing funnel. All of these programs are intended to build awareness and engage people in the selling process.

At the other end is the sales team working to convert these prospects into customers.

We find many companies engaged on either side of the process, many times forgetting how to connect the entire process efficiently together. A key Marketing goal should be to consume as much of that process as possible, minimizing the involvement and expense of Sales.

This can be accomplished by closely evaluating and understanding how people buy your products, and then building the right combination of communications vehicles and sales tools that provide the answers to free up the log jams which can occur within the selling process.

5. The Phased Approach
There is a certain runway that makes sense to properly prepare for a formal company or product launch. Typically, it's 90 days. Sometimes, it has to be less. Rarely is it more. But, 90 days seems to be just right.

When making preparations, it is advisable to consider a "phased approach." As an initial step, do the proper housekeeping to ensure that when promotional programs are launched, the back-end marketing support is in place. Examples of this first phase might include -

• making sure there's a consistent message throughout all marketing materials,
• developing the right kind of marketing literature for use in fulfillment,
• preparing your Web site with the same consistent look and feel,
• ensuring easy navigation and access to information throughout your site,
• devising a method to capture lead information . . . and so on.

A second phase could include preparations for properly introducing the company to the industry influencers and the press. It's appropriate to seek professional assistance by hiring a public relations agency. These groups can help in further refining the company's messages to the media, prepare the materials for distribution to the press, determine who the key contacts in the industry are and help the company gain access to these important influencers.

Also, as part of this phase, other preparation should be made. Your Web site, for instance, should be properly tuned to optimize where and how you might appear on the various popular search engines like Yahoo! and Lycos. Also, certain kinds of testing can be conducted. Buying Web banner ads on specific keywords and phrases on these search engines can be tested, at minimal expense, to determine where good potential roll-out possibilities exist.

And then launch. As we said earlier, approaching the launch like a Wall of Sound will yield wonderfully valuable data. Keep all your eyes and ears wide open to learn what is getting through to the market and where there are potential issues and then beginning tuning your approach.

6. Life's A Test
Even with all this attention to detail and excellent preparation, you should never expect everything to work. If it does, more power to you. If some parts don't, there is inherently an enormous value in these missteps for us to learn more about our prospects. Remember, life's a test. That's because we are taking our best educated guess on how the market will react to our message and our methods of delivery.

Even when we hit the ball out of the park, we still need to evaluate why our program succeeded and try to find ways to beat the best results. Marketing is about testing. You're never done. You should always be looking to create your best. And then beat it.

7. Don't Create Too Much Demand
When we work with our clients, we try to be very cognizant of where they are in their company's lifecycle. No sense starting off with big plans to generate lots of leads without having the right sales infrastructure in place to respond to those leads. There's got to be a balance between a company's capacity to handle demand and the level of spending on marketing programs.

When it comes to lead generation, we typically use a simple mathematical equation to determine the right volume of lead flow. And, hence, what is the proper spending level to attain that lead flow. It looks like this:

As an example, if the XYZ Company wants to attain annual revenues of $1,000,000 and closes an average deal worth $5,000, the company needs to sell 200 products in the coming year. If the sales team is able to close 1 sale for every 10 qualified prospects they talk with, then marketing needs to deliver 2,000 highly qualified leads for the year. This information can then drive the proper level of spending to generate the right amount of demand. And the types of programs needed become a function of who is the target audience, at what level(s) within a company and within what industries do they work.

Most importantly, this can be helpful in determining that the right critical mass is in the Sales department to follow up on the demand that is created. The biggest mistake that can be made is generating a lead that never gets the proper follow-through.

8. Keep It Clear, S-----
This is a slight derivation on the KISS concept, but with the same result. People get confused pretty easily. There's just so much to know about. And no matter what you're selling, you will always find competition that gives it a unique spin, creating even more confusion. It's their effort to drive their best attributes to the forefront and diminish your best qualities in the process. And so it goes.

Clarity is a beautiful thing. It's unencumbered with lots of stuff that doesn't matter. When you think about creating a message for your product or company, it might be insightful to think about the last time you bought insurance.

Buying insurance is about as confusing as it gets. There are just too many options and combinations. Well, then, think about whom, in the end, you bought it from. If it wasn't from a friend of the family, odds are it was the person who explained it the best and helped you understand what was right for you. They made sense of all the nonsense and netted it out for you, so you could make an intelligent choice. And odds are you developed an affinity for and a trust in that person in the process.

This should be a goal of all your marketing communications. If you can't explain what it is a just a few choice words, then you're over-complicating what it is. And you're creating more confusion and slowing the selling process down. Bring clarity and consistency to all forms of communication. It is the hallmark of every good marketing person.

9. The 60/12 Rule
Sixty percent of the people who inquire about your product or service will purchase a like product or service from you or a competitor within the next twelve months. A pretty interesting statistic. And it's one that can mean money in the bank for those who follow the rule.

The 60/12 Rule has proven itself time and again for all different kinds of products and services. In fact, in all our marketing experience, it's yet to be disproved. And it has some very definite ramifications.

The first is the paramount importance of ensuring that all inbound leads have a place to go. Before setting out to generate a single lead, be certain that a leads database has been created, however simple, and that a process is in place to get them entered.

It also means that the gold is in your own leads database and that it should never be neglected. Too much time and money have been dedicated to filling these databases. So, all good marketing plans should not only reach out, but also reach in and farm these inquiries over time. A well-thought out back-end marketing process should be devised to maximize the value of these leads over time.

10. You've Got To Have Passion
Seems obvious. You've got to be passionate about everything you do in life. But, you especially have to be passionate about your company, its mission and its products in order to succeed in business. Market leaders don't go half way. They are driven to win because they believe that their way is the correct way.