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