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