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Future of Marketing and Sales: Facilitating and Monetizing Conversations – Part 2

Challenges with marketing, prospecting, and selling are common to most companies. The ability to get prospects to make a decision to buy your products is vital to the success of your company. Many companies will invest in multiple marketing channels, sales training and other leadership training as the answer to the problem. However, they are not addressing the real issue – connecting with your prospect to inspire them to understand the benefits of your product or service.

We believe the root problem with marketing and sales is prospecting. A survey recently showed that most salespeople believe prospects are scarce. We live in a country of more than 325 million people and 5.6 million employers. How can prospects be scarce? The reason for scarcity of prospects/buyers lies in the method not in the market. Unfortunately, the traditional way of prospecting:

• Is hard on the sales professional. If they don’t hate prospecting starting out, they soon will. They will start procrastinating and then stop all together. This is commonly known as sales reluctance.
• Is hard on the prospect. The prospect is interrupted during the sales process by proactive sales professionals and also is now spending hours of researching options before they even consider a solution.

Today we live in an entirely different era of sales. The buyer has taken control by getting all the information on their own, and doesn’t really believe a salesperson is necessary at the beginning of the sales process.

Conversely, the job of the salesperson also continues to change. While the prospect is not interested in speaking with a salesperson, study after study shows, if the salesperson enters too late into the “buyers journey,” he looses the sale.

So, something must change within the marketing and sales process to help your company reach and connect with buyers. We feel strongly that prospecting can be done well and what follows are our ideas to do so.

Our system of prospecting relies on two basic assumptions:

1. Your product/service must be sold, not just ordered online or sold without human interaction.
2. There are people in the marketplace who need your product and are interested and qualified.

How you market and sell your products needs to change. Marketing professionals are realizing that broadcasting a message multiple times no longer works to have prospects actively share they are ready to buy. Salespeople everywhere are learning that cold calling doesn’t work well anymore. Yet many still believe they must “dial for dollars.”

We want to move your marketing and sales program away from the old methods and into the information age – using modern marketing tools, like LinkedIn, targeted email marketing and content that is of interest to your prospects. We work with you to:

• Define your goals and how to measure success
  • Business strategy and planning
• Review your internal sales and marketing processes and discover opportunities for improvement
  • Sales and marketing alignment
  • Sales process mapping
  • Lead-scoring
• Understand your target audiences and what resonates with them
  • Market and audience research
  • Persona definitions
  • Customer journey mapping
• Determine the right sales and marketing strategy to achieve your goals
  • Strategic marketing plans
  • Sales plans
• Align and craft messaging that appeals to your audiences and stimulates action
  • Audience-focused messaging
• Reach your audiences with the right message through the right channels at the right time (and maintain ongoing contact)
  • LinkedIn selling
  • Content marketing
  • Social media
  • Website development and landing pages
  • Email marketing
  • SEO
  • Paid search
  • Digital advertising
  • Direct marketing
  • Speaking and award programs
  • Collateral
  • Thought leadership (white papers, ebooks, success stories)
  • Community relations
• Cultivate relationships with customers and turn them into raving fans
  • Retention programs
  • Ongoing client engagement and communications
  • Net Promoter Score and satisfaction programs
  • Relationship cultivation

Those who continually adapt themselves to new ideas – get ahead, the rest get left behind. Together let’s tap into the power of modern marketing and sales.

Bill Kiefaber • May 1, 2021

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