It's taken me five years to get to a point where I can confidently tell people what I sell: I am a marketing consultant. I sell marketing plans. Five years. Why so long to figure out something seemingly so basic? Because at first, I wanted to be fancy. I couldn't imagine that merely being a marketing consultant, selling marketing plans, could be anywhere near good enough. Admittedly, I wanted to dress it up in fancy language. The funny thing is that despite not having a clear name for it, I had an elevator pitch that beautifully described the value I added. Strange how it is somehow easier to spin a 30-second story than give it a concise name! I find many business owners have a similar problem. After tweeting my initial thoughts around this topic in the past week, someone responded saying it took one of their clients two years to figure out how to name what they sell! The challenge is clear, in two seconds (not thirty), answer me this: What do you sell? It is

It's fascinating to think about how you can sell one thing, yet meet many needs. As a kid, I enjoyed kicking a ball in the park, and that one ball did many things for me, depending on the day. I got rid of frustration, energy, cleared my head, managed boredom or played with friends. One ball; many needs. As businesses, we typically sell only a handful of stuff, yet the number of potentially different needs we meet for our customers are many times more. It is this idea of "what need do you meet for your customer" that sits at the heart of marketing and sales. Only by getting to the real problem; the genuine desire that they have can you successfully sell your offering at the optimal price and grow the business. The challenge many businesses experience is they don't know how to get to the heart of the customers' needs. You certainly can't get there through "sales mode". Instead, you need to listen to customers, talk with them to understand thei

Business owners rightfully expect marketing activities to lead to sales, but how should this work? The question is even more urgent when the focus is on selling to other businesses instead of individuals (so-called business to business, or B2B sales). How can marketing activity supporting industrial equipment and professional services sales? The only way marketing communication will positively impact topline growth, otherwise known as “sales in the income statement,'' is through a tight interconnection between “marketing” and “sales”. A valuable exercise is to visualise this interconnection, otherwise known as the purchase funnel. Take a piece of paper and list all your marketing and sales activities and draw a line that connects it to your prospective customer and a potential sale. This line represents the purchase funnel of your business. It's seldom straight, meaning it may start with someone seeing a post on LinkedIn, then taking a detour to your website before g

It is the dream of every business owner to have a single agency that can make all their marketing pain disappear. This agency will come in, understand the business, do all the marketing activity that needs doing and, importantly, do it precisely the way the business owner wants it done. My view? Such an agency doesn't exist, and if it does, please comment on this post with your secret. From my experience, the one-stop agency hardly ever delivers one-stop service. They always drop the ball somewhere, have a weakness they don't know of, or don't admit too, and more often than not fail to offer a real holistic solution. But one cannot blame the agencies. They need all the business they can get and will hardly ever say no. They know of the need for "full-service" agencies and often market themselves as such, despite it not being the full story. The reality is that marketing is much too broad, too complicated and too fast-moving for a single agency to be able t

Here are a few strategic questions I ask when I engage companies on their marketing: Where do you want to go with this company? What are you selling? Who are you selling it too? Why must they buy it? How do you communicate it to them? Are customers responding? Clearly, these are foundational, but are they marketing strategy questions, or business strategy questions? The more I consult to companies, the more I am confronted by the overlap in these. In many cases, marketing strategy is business strategy. Often step one in helping a company improve its marketing, is to focus on the business itself. If there is no vision, clear offerings and clarity on whom it serves, there can be no marketing. Marketing strategy depends on business strategy. Be careful next time that you phone a marketer - they may just ask uncomfortable business questions. Marketing strategy questions are really business strategy questions in disguise. If your business strategy is unclear, you can't do

The usual progression goes like this: Sell through your network, Sell through a sales force, Sell through marketing. As you move from one level to the next, the job becomes incrementally more difficult.  10X. There's this idea of "ten ex", i.e. ten times better, faster, smarter in order to stand a chance and survive in today's business environment. Maybe 10X also applies to the added difficulty of moving from network selling to salesforce selling, to sales driven by marketing?  Using a salesforce is ten times more difficult than relying on your network, and incorporating marketing comms is a further ten times harder. Think about it. Maybe 10X also applies to the added difficulty of moving from network selling to salesforce selling, to sales driven by marketing?  Selling through marketing is likely a hundred times more difficult than asking your buddy to buy from you. (it is also a much more powerful because your reach is much larger)

List your marketing activities and draw a line that connects everything to the next sale. This line represents the purchase funnel of your business. It's seldom straight, meaning it may start with someone seeing a post on LinkedIn, then taking a detour to your website before going back to LinkedIn and then emailing you. This line is the purchase funnel of your business. It is the bridge that connects your company to the customer. It is probably the most critical concept to understand for entrepreneurs. If you can draw this line that connects your product, marketing comms, business dev and sales to the customer's eyeballs, you are in the money. A pathway to the gold at the end of the rainbow. All you need to do now is make sure your product is available and delivers on its promise. Sweet dreams. It is a well-accepted analogy that marketing (in its broadest sense) as a bridge that connects your company with prospective customers. This bridge can have many on-roads where pro

You want marketing to deliver the leads but are you following the scent? Let's work backwards: Did you receive enquiries last month? You'd be surprised how many business owners don't know that answer. Assuming you had received a few, do you know how these people managed to find you? Again, many businesses do not have a coordinated funnel to proactively fetch opportunities and feed them into the sales process. But how do you turn things around to become proactive, instead of reactive? Predictive, in a sense. Can you get it to a point where you know that if you do A, B, C and D you will get around 4 enquiries and convert at least 1 or 2 into a client? Can you start to budget for income, and not just expenses? Marketing will never be an exact science, but if you do it properly, meaning you do a hand full of things well, and know why you do it and keep track of results, then it should become a tool to influence future income. Can you start to budget for income, a

Many owner-managed companies are suffering from marketing indigestion. There's simply nothing happening, or whatever happens moves through the system "slowly and painfully". The marketing is stuck. The website does not get updated, the brochure remains out of date, posting to social media is infrequent, and conference attendance happens occasionally. Yet, the business owner wants to see more happening. What's going on here? What's the reason for the stagnation? The problem is that marketing invariably involves communication, i.e. telling the world a story about your business and this means a) agreeing on what the story is, b) deciding how to say it, and c) doing so in a way that achieves results. This process is exceedingly difficult for most small and medium-sized companies.  It is difficult because it is daunting. What do you say in a world where there are many more prominent players shouting much louder than you and where the wrong message can har

Too many small and medium-sized companies neglect their brand and focus solely on what they do. This is a huge mistake. Your customers don't just make decisions based on performance and pricing, but also on how they feel. The better your company looks, the better the feeling it leaves prospective buyers. Legendary marketing professor Phillip Kotler says: "does anybody really believe that people can turn themselves into unemotional and utterly rational machines when at work?" The aesthetics of your business matters, no matter the sector you serve. A well-crafted brand creates a professional image that underscores all the "soft stuff" that ultimately determines a deal, such as trust, expertise, attention to detail, modernity and a point of difference. Does your business look good to the outside world? By focusing on both what you do as a business, and how you look, you can stand out from the crowd and take charge of your customer relationships by showing

A major challenge for both the small and medium-sized business is that it does not have access to the same sources of information tha n  big companies do. Simply not knowing is often the main reason for not acting or not seeing results on the business development front. The problem is even worse when the customer is not a single individual, such as  a shopper in a retailer,  but  an other busines s  (business to business sales). It is easier asking  an individual  why they are buying  a brand of cereals  than  getting the same information from a company where many people are involved in a purchase decision .   But as a  growing  business, you ’ ve got to open the taps  on  a constant flow of market information, no matter the industry you are in. Simply sitting in your office (or on your cellphone) and hoping to  know what customers want, or trusting your sales team to tell you the full picture,  won’t work.  As the boss, you need to get your hands on some raw, unfiltered f

Too many small professional services businesses try to act like big professional services businesses when they start, leading to lots of misery for the founder(s). You can't market your small consultancy, like a big consultancy, to put it plainly. The reason for this is simple: a big consultancy has an established brand. Clients know the brand and trust it and have a broad idea of what they can expect when working with "someone from that company". This is not the same with a startup consultancy where there is no "company" brand established yet. Professional services, more than any other business, is all about trust. Clients need to believe that you can deliver and that you have their best interests at heart. This is especially true since the "product" is an intangible, i.e., a service you provide. The mistake most consultants make is that they try and hide behind the name of their business as they start out. They quickly ask a graphic designer to

You won't build a sustainable business unless you build a company brand, and to build a brand, you need to do marketing. Scream and kick as much as you like, but ultimately you will have to spend money on marketing to create a name for your business that stands by itself, even if you are on holiday, or dead. I have come to realise that few business owners want to grow beyond a certain point, so I have stopped saying to them "do marketing for growth". Growth can be a pain, and most entrepreneurs just want to have a good life (including me). Growing for the sake of growing seems "so American". Instead, I have realised there is a much more appealing proposal: do marketing to build a brand.  When marketing blossoms, you have a brand. Almost every entrepreneur wants to leave a legacy. The business is their art-piece,  and they want to know that it will stay behind even if they are long gone. Doing proper marketing is essential in making sure this can happ

There is somewhat of a trend globally not to have "Chief Marketing Officers" in large companies but rather other titles, such as Chief Growth Officers (the title at Coca Cola), etc. You can't help but wonder: do you, as a business owner, even need someone with the title "marketing" in your company? My answer? Not necessarily. But you do need marketing, as a business skill, in your company! No business can survive without marketing. There is no debate about whether marketing fundamentals are still relevant. Being focused on the customer; defining a clear value proposition; having a strong, well-recognised brand and clear messaging. These things are not in dispute. But do you need someone with the title "marketing" to make these things happen? Not really. Arguably, the best marketer to have ever lived is Steve Jobs, and his title was never "Chief Marketing Officer". He was the CEO of Apple but understood the essentials of marketing

In business, when you don't know what to say, you use the word "strategy". Do we have a strategy? What is the strategy? Let's have a strategy workshop. It's an overused word that means: I'm not sure what to do, and desperately need to look confident. Strategy time! But do you really need a marketing strategy, or is it just a fancy word for hot air? Let's answer this by starting at the beginning: In business, you want to make investments, not incur expenses. An "investment" is similar to an "expense" but with a long term benefit to the business. To move from pure expense to investment, you need to think deeply about how you spend your money: where are you spending it, why and what should the results be? I regard this process of thinking as "strategy". Too many businesses don't think through their marketing, meaning it remains a pure expense, with little upside. This is why you need a marketing strategy - to

I was at a function last week when the owner of a small business told me he was struggling to make sales. I hear this often, but what made it different this time was that the business had an existing contract with a big corporate: MTN, the multinational mobile operator. How do you struggle for new business when you already have such a large customer on your side? Like most entrepreneurs, this one also had a lingering feeling that maybe better marketing could be the answer, but precisely what needed to be done? I decided to try and help with some practical advice: My first question: Where do you want to get new business from? (he needed some time to think - like most entrepreneurs faced with this question) Answer: Other telecoms companies. Me: do you have a list of such "other telecoms companies"? Him: no First recommendation: Get someone to prepare such a list. (a good idea, he thought)  Me: once you have your list, do you know what you are goi

I was in a meeting this week with an owner who was clearly frustrated with the marketing results he had seen over the years. He was at wit's end with all the "e-marketers" that has been through his door, none able to help him grow his business. From my experience working with entrepreneurs, many share this frustration. Yet, despite its poor track record, successful marketing remains an ideal that many entrepreneurs are hoping for as they try and grow their companies. They tend to give up on marketers, but not on marketing. Fundamentally, there is an understanding that surely a pure sales based approach cannot be the only way. A sales only approach is inefficient. Hours on the phone trying to secure meetings. More hours on the road driving to meetings, waiting in reception areas, often just to be told to come back later. And once you get into the meeting, there is the inevitable fight over price with margins disappearing quickly. A sales-based approach is

Let's think about your sales situation as a garden. Most businesses have a bone dry garden. There's hardly anything growing, or the little that is, grows too slow. How to improve this situation? Surprisingly, most entrepreneurs will admit they should sprinkle a dose of marketing water over their sales garden to stimulate growth. But there is a problem...instead of piping the water in, many entrepreneurs dump it in, or drip it in. By dumping the proverbial marketing water into your sales garden, the marketing is all over the place with lots of spillage and erosion. No one knows what is going where and why. Today it's Facebook, tomorrow Google Ads; then a few events, followed by nothing for months. On the contrary, dripping the water in results in too little activity happening. You spend a couple of bucks here and there hoping to see a change. With both dumping and dripping, the results are poor. Neither has a measurable effect on sales. You need to pipe the marketing

It is one thing agreeing to do marketing. It is a whole different thing, actually doing it. Most small/medium sized businesses don't do marketing, because - get this - they don't do marketing. That's right; nothing happens, because no-one is doing it. I see this all the time. My client agrees to update their website; then nothing happens; post to social media, nothing happens; write a monthly article to establish opinion leadership....nothing. Marketing requires someone in the business to do something, or someone outside the company must be tasked with doing it. Bottom-line, something needs to happen. "Sales" happen when someone picks up the phone and makes a call to a prospect and goes to visit them. Manufacturing happens when someone flicks a switch to start the machines. Marketing happens when someone writes something, designs it, posts it and promotes it. It doesn't "just happen". If you believe that marketing is an important component of h

We’re all looking to find new business, but how many potential sales sit in your existing network? If you had to send a short email to everyone you have been dealing with over the last five years and told them you’re still around, still focused on solving the same problems, only difference: you’re now better and more experienced - how many of them will re-engage with you? Essentially this is what a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is all about - extracting value from relationships. The more I am building my own consulting business, the more I realise the importance of going back to reap, where I have already sowed. It is not just about establishing new fields. In your company, do you keep a list of who you have been dealing with and periodically touch base again? Interestingly, I don’t believe it matters whether these contacts had a good or bad experience working with you. There could have been a massive fallout, or a disastrous outcome - the fact is time