Trident 21 blog – Marketing vs Sales
Businesses, entrepreneurs and managers tend to over complicate “marketing” or “sales.” This often leads to frustration, missed goals and expectations not met. You may end up with individuals in roles or performing functions that they shouldn’t be and a strategy that cannot be properly executed.
The first step to uncomplicating this and really putting together an action plan that will help you grow your business is to understand the fact that they are two very different functions and operations of your business. They do work in hand-in-hand as part of your growth strategy.
The second step is understanding the basics of each. Before I dive into each a little more, I want to clarify how they each should be interpreted. Marketing needs to be replaced with the word “ATTENTION.” When you start to look at marketing as getting attention and sales as what takes place once you have that attention, every action will appear more clear and execution more attainable.
Marketing is the act of getting attention, period. It is not sales, it must understand sales and support sales because the attention that is gained must strategically tee up the sales process or team to make the sale. Depending on the business model, that sale does organically take place because of the attention it received. Another big piece of shifting the mindset of marketing as getting attention is that you can get attention with spending significantly less money than you may have spent in the past on “marketing.”
I want to give a few examples of attention that can be performed at zero cost to a business owner or in fact help drive growth.
1. A local restaurant that normally has the owner or head chef perform a public cooking event, where people can come in, pay for their experience and ingredients and learn to cook that meal with the chef. This experience can be marketing through social media, their website, in their restaurant, etc. It will drive attention to not only the event, but also and more importantly to their business. This entire concept can be pivoted giving the circumstances that we face today. When doing a live class is either not able to be performed due to timing or situations, that same chef can do a recorded cooking lesson. That cooking lesson, done the same as if there were several live participants, is posted on YouTube and attention to the video is driven by social media, etc. That cooking lesson now is not held back by the walls of a business, but for local viewers and patrons of that restaurant, that business can make all of the ingredients available to purchase in their raw form so the meal can be cooked that weekend at home. Shoot the video and post it on a Monday, take orders through Thursday, have the orders ready to pick up on Friday.
2. A business owner that has a clothing store starts posting pictures of products being worn, videos with fun fashion tips, or more that brings value to their customers digitally. When content is created that is valuable, engaging and entertaining, people will share it and engage with it. When a business owner understands the platform that they are using to drive attention and create content specific for that platform and what users expect, the attention and response can be incredible.
3. A salesperson who focuses on business-to-business sales is looking to grow their personal brand (reputation) in a community can bring value to existing clients and potentially new ones by providing FREE advice, valuable business content and more. Become someone that is a business resource in your community. Create a blog, share information on social media, interact with businesses digitally and respond to their activity with your activity. All of this will help you get attention that you can use later.
These are all some simple examples of how to get attention without spending a dime. Now that you have gained attention, how do you turn it into sales?
As you see in the examples, the content and action provided were based in providing value to the person that consumed the content. If you executed on getting attention properly, the sales that the attention has gotten you will come easier.
You action of getting attention can directly or indirectly create the next step for the person consuming it. For example, let’s use example #2, after the fun fashion tip that got someone’s attention, was shared and reshared on social media, the video could be concluded with “want to see more fashion tips, check us out on our YouTube channel or visit us at XYZboutique.com.” and point to an e-commerce site.
Finally, let’s look at your sales process. Is your sales process built to continue to provide value and a great customer experience? If not, you should really reevaluate that sales process.
If you can build an experience that adds value, truly aligns the growth and interest of the potential customer with yours and creates an incredible experience, then that sale will continue to yield more attention for you. It does not matter if you are in business to consumer sales or business to business sales, aligning yourself with the needs of your customer truly provides more than just a “sale.” It builds a relationship and people talk about relationships.
You can learn and hear more about this concept from the podcast The Garyvee Audio Experience. That podcast has me verbalize much of what I have done and taught for years in a more eloquent fashion.