Sales and Marketing nuggets for October 2020

There would be anxiety for anything new you do for the first time Unless you try, you won't know whether it works for you. Have some portion carved for such first-time things.

Is your sales team asking questions that go past information? Are your salespeople asking questions that would unearth some information regarding historical events and behavioral triggers that brought the prospect to the table.

What are you lead magnets? While generating the content, the marketing team needs to be aware of the objective of every piece of content it produces

Marketing is taking your message further and faster. You need to be sure that the right message is propagated When marketers are augmenting the right message, the benefits are enormous. However, if they do not amplify the right message, the desired results couldn't be achieved.

How are you making your content localized? The Internet has no boundaries, and hence it is not easy to target a geo-specific audience. It is not impossible, though. You need to be aware of territorial and cultural nuances to be effective.

Are you participating in discussion forums and groups on social platforms to learn more about your customers? It would be best if you kept a tab on changing expectations of your customers. Expectations are dynamic and will continue to evolve.

Are you building on what you have or changing the game every day? You can have an inside-out or outside-in approach for building your marketing strategy. The only problem with the outside-in approach is that you might have to change your position often.

Are you able to change the behavior of your customers? The vital role of marketing is to change the behavior of the people. That's how people got motivated to try bicycles when they didn't know how to balance, sit in a heavy iron box running on rails, or ready to try a new fashion.

Collect data, perform the study, gather insights and act on them These are the four simple steps of data-driven marketing. Many marketers don't go beyond the first or second step. The real value lies towards the end of the fourth step.

What is the right marketing platform for your industry? Every product and industry has a platform or set of platforms that perform better over the others. If you do a proper study, it might turn out that LinkedIn could perform better for your B2C business & Snapchat for your B2B business.

Understanding the changing customer expectations is an ongoing quest Customers' expectations are bound to change. Only if the marketers are aware of it and are continually making efforts to understand the direction and pace of change, then they will be able to promote their offerings effectively.

How are you devising the strategy to appeal to a local market through your marketing efforts? For many companies, the most important market is the local market. One size fits all strategy might not work for them. Your local market strategy should have some nuances of the local language, culture, and other local elements.

If you want to outperform your competition, you will need to outdo yourself first There's no way you will beat the competition if you are not improving what you are doing. First, get into the contest with yourself.

Marketing needs continuous learning and experimentation Marketing involves the continuous study of your customers, marketplace, and offerings. With digital marketing, you ought to learn about new platforms, tools, and techniques too.

How can you change the premise of what you offer? If you want to change the game rules, you need to give a different perspective to your buyers. You need to stop talking about features and focus on benefits. You need to stop talking about yourself and talk about them.

If you are expecting different results, then you need to change your actions If you keep doing the same thing, then you will reap the same results. If you want to get better results, then first know what actions are producing disproportionate positive outcomes.

What would help you grow 10x? Always ask yourself this question. Even if you could do half of it diligently and achieve one-fourth of that periodically, you would achieve phenomenal growth.

What would make your buyer come back to you often? If you could find the answer to this question, then you can improve your repeat purchases. It would increase your revenue with the same set of buyers.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and value is in the mind of the buyer The buyer would eventually decide the value of your products or services. You can only try to give a different view of looking at your offerings or suggest a new use case. However, the buyer would judge the real value.

How can you make the buying journey interesting for your customers? You can creatively enhance buyer journey touch-points. You can convert buyers' waiting period into an engaging game time. You can make boring status update messages fun for buyers. You could do so many other things.

People are not searching for information on Google alone Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and many others are fighting for the search share. So, don't only think about Google. Think of your industry-specific search sites for organic and relevant portals for paid promotions too.

Empathy is critical for marketers If you couldn't view the world from your customers' point of view, it would be tough to think of your products and services' value from the customers' perspective. Marketers first need to feel like customers to be able to think like them.