Let’s talk marketing.
Marketing is not sales.
Marketing helps you to sell, but the tools of marketing are not made to close a deal. At my meetings with clients and prospects I hear quite a lot of arguments in this area, the common of which is ‘we made a website or made an advertisement online, and we didn’t sell anything”. Sales happen after a 5th-8th direct contact, and marketing is even a more long-term game. Marketing creates your brand, and a brand is your reputation. And as you know , it takes time to build a strong one. Marketing warms up your audience. When it’s done correctly, sales happen easily.
Marketing can’t go without sales, and vice versa
If in your company those two functions are not connected, you lose. You lose customers, you lose your money. And you lose the perspective. Sales representatives are the ones who are in direct contact with customers and it’s them who collect valuable feedback about your product. For a marketing team it’s crucial to know that feedback so that it can change or create a strategy taking into consideration those pain points. When I helped to launch one SAAS company, based in Amsterdam, I really struggled without such information – for some reasons sales reps could not get it from the customers. The feedback from them would be priceless for my marketing strategy back then- I could use it to create content to address their pains and needs. A constant communication between your marketing and sales teams is vital for your business.
Marketing equals digital marketing
What other kind of marketing would you be doing in the near future?
The largest media companies now are Google and Facebook. They control the biggest number of eye-balls, it means your customers and prospects are online! If you are not present there, you simply give away the part of your business to your competitors that are more digitally savvy. And this is so obvious that the discussions whether to develop a strong digital presence or not seems not only irrelevant, but even unprofessional.
And COVID-19 only strengthened this tendency!
