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Marketing The Misunderstood Child within the Sales Process

Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: Business and sales people really confuse marketing with selling and the overall sales process. This confusion potentially creates a lack of clarity resulting in not understanding the desired message. TV commercials have the potential to be compelling and yet many fail that challenge.

Marketing The Misunderstood Child within the Sales Process

Marketing is probably more misunderstood than its sibling, Selling. Both are children of the Sales Process.

The purpose of marketing is to:

• Attract Attention
• Begin to build a relationship

Now the goal is also two-fold:

1. Make a friend
2. Secure a first time appointment

I realized how misunderstood marketing truly is upon viewing the annual release of the Super Bowl Commercials. Some were good, some Okay and some left me totally clueless. Now being somewhat older, I realize to attract my attention and begin to build a relationship may be different than a 20 year old or even 40 year old. The reason people watch the ads is this medium of TV (video) is because TV can effectively engage these 3 senses:

1. Sight
2. Hearing
3. Feelings

One of the past ads was from Career Builder. This was targeted to 40 and 50 year olds I believe, but not sure. (I had to watch the ad several times to understand the message and this indicates it was not successful marketing.) Yet, all the people dressed in underwear truly distracted me from their final message. What this showed me is there is a lot of poor marketing happening and this is an opportunity for any one who wishes to put a little effort into their marketing activities.

For example, small business owners to C Level executives to entrepreneurs to professional sales people can create their own successful marketing commercials and post them to YouTube. By remembering the purpose of marketing and the goals of marketing for zero cash outlay to a nominal amount around $300 to $500, videos can quickly demonstrate a return on investment. Sales Training Coaching Tip: Video was the fastest marketing activity in 2011 and continues to grow.

Recently I received a YouTube Video entitled Any Dummy Can Do LinkedIn. Using some creativity, leveraging an existing client, building a strategic alliance all worked together to produce an engaging 6 minutes of attracting attention and building a relationship. Sales Training Coaching Tip: If you are not into social media or believe social media is a bunch of "hooey" then you might believe this video has zero value.

The potential buyer (a.k.a. prospect or viewer) comes away with the following:

• Knowing the service (or product) being offered
• Affirmation by a current client of the quality of the service
• Understanding the level of expertise or quality specific to seller
• Sense of the personality of the seller (psychographics in reverse)
• An emotional reaction ranging from outstanding to "you have got to be kidding"

When the marketing message is memorable and is directly connected to the product or service (minus the strong arm sales pitch), then the potential customer will be more inclined to share her or his experience with others such as "Did you say that dummy on "Any Dummy Can Do LinkedIn" video?" "Pretty creative!" instead of a reaction like "What was that commercial about? Underwear in the office or casual Fridays?"

One final observation specific to misunderstood marketing is the approach. Many businesses are still engaged in the traditional product or sales based marketing. These are the folks that show up and then spew price, product or proposal. (Sales Training Coaching Tip: I call this the 3 Ps Virus.) Now smarter individuals adopt a different approach by educating their potential customers. Education based marketing reaps far greater rewards and in many cases is far less expensive.

Successful marketing is probably the greatest challenge for any business from micro to macro. However when time is invested in creating a written sales action plan, a written integrated marketing action plan along with a written executive marketing summary and then all actions are plotted out in a calendar to coincide with marketplace trends, then marketing no longer becomes the misunderstood child within the sales process.

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Article Tags: marketing message, purpose of marketing, sales process, sales training coaching, small business owners



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Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
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