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