Sales and Marketing nuggets for August 2020
What's the focus of your community-building initiative - your offering or customers? Communities are about people and not about things. The community will thrive when people feel belonged there. They will feel belonged only when they will be able to form meaningful conversations with real people.
The economic value of the content is zero if it is not read or shared The purpose of developing content is to make it accessible so that people can read it, relate to it, and then share it. If content development is not resulting in views and shares, then the exercise is futile.
Dear salespeople, please learn to identify the wrong customer early in the discussion and say no to them One wrong customer can add the delivery and support load equivalent to the five right customers. If salespeople are bringing wrong customers unknowingly to bring in more revenue and achieve their targets, then it is going to increase the load on your delivery team.
How frequently are you reviewing the marketing plan and updating it? The marketing plans are developed once a year diligently. However, they are not diligently reviewed every quarter to discuss learnings and updating the future course.
Is your community initiative led by a single person acting as a single point of contact for the community members? The community initiatives shouldn't be a walled garden where members don't have access to the internals of the company. When members have full access to people and internal workings of the company, the relationship deepens.
Our understanding is limited by what we already know. If we don't know enough, then we are limiting our understanding Unless we expand our knowledge about the customers, it is tough to understand our customers. You can't understand them well if you don't know them.
Humans are a machine with software, which appears rational, loaded on an irrational hardware At the very core, all the decisions are emotional. They are processed to assign logical reasons later. So, salespeople need to appease tacit irrational expectations of their customers with explicit rational demands.
Insights are discovered by those who are curious about the possibilities As a marketer, we have to be curious about things. If a customer has clicked on one CTA and not the other, then it should raise the 'why' question in our mind. If that is not happening, then all analytics tools' reports would just be the numbers to you.
Is it a case study or customer success story? Interestingly, many marketers use these terms interchangeably. Failure is a possible outcome with a case study. The focus here is on learning and experimentation.
A good marketer would know how to market the failures "I haven't failed -- I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." See, I had told you. There are so many good examples of failures around us used creatively to highlight the efforts gone into making something.
How does the intersection of the things we are confident about and competent at look? For an organization to grow, it is crucial that the sales team is confident about the organization's competence and are selling precisely that.
Creative campaigns need imaginative marketers To visualize and pursue a creative campaign, it needs a firm conviction. Only a marketer, who can imagine, will have a strong belief to push for such a campaign when there's no data to support.
The most significant value of social media is that it allows you to listen to the conversations of your audience You can learn a great deal about your customers by following the conversations they are participating in social media. Knowing your customers better would help you communicate with them in a constructive way.
How are you demonstrating your expertise in the marketplace? There are so many ways in which you can display your expertise. It could be by sharing customer success stories, conducting webinars, publishing whitepapers, etc. Every organization has a different level of comfort with different kinds of assets.
People will remember what you do now instead of what you say now Action speaks louder than words. It's right in the business world too. Demonstrating through actions goes a long way than mere lip service.
Instead of selling try helping solve their problems Nobody likes to be sold. But everybody wants to be helped in achieving their goals. If you are helping them get closer to their goals, then there's a good chance they will buy.
Company will benefit from being focused on the right things at the right time Your market insight and customer knowledge will help you be in the right place, focusing on the right things at the right time. You have to upgrade your information radars to collect and process as much information as possible to succeed in the market.
It isn't easy to match 100% requirements in the services business. Do we know what requirements are unmet? Service offerings are complex and include many dynamic elements based on three additional marketing Ps (people, process, and physical evidence). Unless we know what requirements we are leaving unaddressed, it would be not easy to win customers.
