Make Your Marketing Work Harder To Make Your Selling Easier

Today I wanted to share with you some bits of a conversation I had with a client on Friday. He was expressing to me his frustration about all the time he was having to spend selling his services. He said numerous times it felt like all he was doing was meeting with people either not qualified for his services, or not at all interested in what he was truly offering.

As I dug in further and asked about what kind of marketing he was doing, his answer turned out to be very similar to what most businesses in his industry would do, display ads, some newspaper ads, a little bit of direct mail, but mostly cold calling.

Now, as our conversation continued I explained to him the importance of combining both your sales and marketing efforts so they can piggyback off of one another to deliver 10x’s the results he’s currently getting.

You see, I really think sales and marketing are just different phases of the same thing. Marketing is the very beginning of the sales cycle and its goal should be to spit qualified, ready-to-buy prospects out the back-end so the sales cycle can easily convert them to customers.

What I consider to be selling, is really nothing more than answering any last minute questions or helping the prospect over the last few objections or hurdles they have. I view it like this because if I’ve designed my marketing processes correctly, they already know everything they need to know in order to decide if I’m the right guy for the job.

So, what did I tell this fellow in order to cut down the time he spent ‘selling’?

The first thing I told him to do was to stop wasting his money on ineffective ‘image’ type advertising and to start using direct response marketing. I instructed him to change his display ads and newspaper ads to include an offer and call to action, specifically in the form of a free report.

The same thing goes for the direct mail. Present your prospects with an opportunity to learn more about your business and why you’re the best option out of all the available choices. Doing this will move them through the sales cycle considerably and make your sales job a whole lot easier.

On the back-end of these initial marketing efforts, we’re going to create some educational materials that further educates his prospects about his business and why he’s the ideal choice, as well as presents them with some trial offers to get them to take a chance on him.

The whole goal of this new marketing system is to not only generate qualified leads, but filter through the tire-kickers before he wastes any time with them face-to-face. This will give him a considerable amount of time back to spend working on other parts of his business or to continue improving his marketing systems.

So, what could you do with your business to improve the results of your marketing and to cut down on unnecessary waste?

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