Translating marketing activity into top-line growth

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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 going back to LinkedIn and then emailing you.

Understanding the purchase funnel of your business is one of the most powerful concepts in entrepreneurship. It is essentially the growth engine of the business. Knowing how marketing connects with sales, how it connects with customers and ultimately how it connects with the purchase allows you to take a much more proactive stance towards driving topline growth.

Almost everyone knows that they need a marketing strategy but few know what this means in practice. In its simplest form, a marketing strategy is to have clarity on the purchase funnel for your business.

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