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Showing posts from May, 2019

The customer is the boss (even though you think you know better)

I spent time yesterday workshopping through a marketing challenge with a team of very clever people. An electrical engineering PhD, software programmer and university lecturer. They have built the most amazing tool you can imagine. And no one is buying it. Needless to say, as a last resort, they phoned a marketer. Some of the questions they asked: “How much harder must we try to sell?” “How much longer should we spend money on marketing?” “How do we get people to use it?” In my experience, the way to talk about marketing to highly analytical people is to revert back to the core foundations of marketing - the stuff that is decades old and forms the basis of how companies have always grown. Market research, market segments; target customers, brand positioning, marketing messaging and the four Ps: price, promotion, place and product. Thinking through a marketing challenge this way requires everyone in the room, especially myself as the consultant, to admit that actually, we do

Focus on marketing strategy to see sales results

It’s about results. Every function in your business must deliver results. Clear; tangible, measured in numbers, and ultimately, money. As I work with small-medium sized companies this truth is evident daily. There is no room for wastage. Every function in the business must deliver - results. But why does Marketing have such a bad reputation with this? Why is so much marketing counted as wastage? It’s because marketing is very easy to do, but very difficult to get right. It’s like running - everyone can run, but only about a hundred and forty people have ever run a hundred meters under 10 seconds. Unbelievable. Everyone can do marketing, but very few see results. Why? Because marketing has two parts: a doing part, and a strategy part. The doing part is flooded with easy options. You can open a Facebook page for your business in minutes and spend the first hundred bucks instantly. However, the strategy part is hidden, silent and where the real secret lies. Marketing strategy

Stop obsessing over price and start obsessing over value

Are you selling value? Or something else? This is the most critical question in business. What's on offer; does it hold value, and if so - how much, and then - how much do you charge for it? Ultimately, your business is a value delivery vehicle, and the lubricant that makes the engine run, is pricing. More importantly, the way to make sure your business is sustainable is to pin your pricing to value, and not the cost of goods. This is where the idea of a Value Merchant comes in. Being a Value Merchant is the core idea behind the book "Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business Markets". I read a summary of it this week and was struck by the power of trading value. When you look at it, you realise your price does not necessarily have to be the lowest, as long as value delivered is relatively high! The critical question then: do you know how much value you add to your customer's business and how this stacks up against the competi

Selling a critical part requires careful planning

Last week I wrote about tough sales, but this week I realised there is a whole other level of sales toughness - the critical sale. The more I work with industrial clients, the more I realise that every factory has a machine that should not break down. If it does, the entire operation comes to a standstill, and people's jobs are on the line. If you're the supplier of parts to this machine, you're making critical sales. A critical sale is a whole different game. Suddenly price is not the issue – reliability, performance and after-sales support are. If something breaks, it's serious! Convincing a customer to buy a critical part from you, for their essential machine, takes a long time. Two things need to happen: you need to start building a relationship with the prospect long before they buy from you, and you need to wait for your chance for the current supplier to drop the ball. Patience is of the essence. Since critical sales are typically high value and complex,

To crack a tough sales environment requires a multi-layered marketing approach

It's not tricky selling ice-cream to beachgoers on a hot summers day. Just walk up and down the promenade with a cooler box and make some noise. A good bell will do. The sale itself is easy, but why?  The market is captured, sitting right there on the beach. The competition are few - you make sure of that by chasing them away! Barriers to entry are relatively high; you need a cooler box, a supply of cheap ice-cream and the willingness to walk up and down under a baking sun. It's a tough job, but the sale is easy, and the marketing strategy reflects this. It's simple - just ring a bell. However,  as the sale gets tougher, the approach to marketing should become equally more sophisticated. You can't do tough sales with easy marketing. Tough sales are everywhere, especially in these economic times: engineering firms dependent on fewer government tenders; mining equipment makers fighting a declining industry and competitive imports; SaaS companies looking for a brea