“Efficient marketing requires a target, followed by a message that immediately resonates sufficiently to foster a conversation between two willing parties.” - David C. Baker
When that pithy sentence from marketing guru David Baker hit my email box in February, it rang true.
It’s very relevant for the companies I work with. They often find their sales growth is held back by one or more of these issues:
- It’s hard to get prospects to comprehend ahead of time how delighted they will be once they become customers
- Limited awareness and little-to-no-differentiation from what competitors are saying
- Using self-centered or product-centric messaging that doesn’t connect with the audience
- Doing random acts of marketing communications, or none at all
- Ad hoc selling, vs. having a process
Fortunately, those issues are solvable, and we can get the business on the road to achieving its sales and profit goals.
How?
By building a proactive, systematic Marketing & Sales Engine that puts Baker’s formula into practice.
Target
Target is the first of Baker’s four crucial words, so our initial steps are:
1. Define the company’s goals and objectives so we can align the marketing and sales initiative
2. Target the buyer characteristics, needs, buying environments, and geographies where we can add the biggest value and win. Segment and prioritize our audience.
3. Change our solution offering if necessary to win with these targets
Message
4. Develop messaging that’ll shape how prospects and customers think and feel about us, resonating because it:
- It’s prospect-centric, not us-centric, and speaks to what they care about most
- Is based on our greatest value
- Is implemented at key touch points along the prospect-to-customer journey
5. Implement the new messaging first on the website and in talk tracks, and expand from there
6. Build a library of marketing and sales communications ammo for each step in the prospect-to-customer journey, and proposal templates
7. Equip and align our people with the Brand Promise
Conversation
8. Approach with proactive, integrated Marketing & Sales
9. Develop and conduct systematic outreach campaigns (many of my clients go after specifically identifiable companies and individual members of the buying decision group, rather than such numerous prospects that they have to be reached by mass media)
- Compile, improve and expand the contact database, so that we have customers and past prospects, and acquire more contacts in our new targeted areas
- Develop “easy yes” offers designed to engage prospects on a simple step along the journey
- Write a series of email templates for Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns
- Stand up marketing automation software and build the campaign maps and autoresponders
10. Develop systematic inbound attraction and conversion
- Research and select keywords to make the website and social content findable
- Get backlinks and other SEO measures in place
- Set up a process for handling and screening inbound opportunities
11. Set up metrics in CRM and marketing automation for assessing responses to our outbound and inbound communications, making refinements to optimize ROI
12. Educate and train the selling team on the message and how to integrate their efforts with marcom
Efficient
We do Insights work because it multiplies the effectiveness of the execution and the ROI of the marketing and sales communications the company subsequently invests in.
Next Steps
That’s the proven process. If you want to follow that path, but realize that you can get to your goals faster with outside help, let’s schedule a time to talk.