Marketing and sales, aren’t these two words that essentially mean or do the same thing? Many people misunderstand the interrelation between marketing and sales, how they drive one another, how they support one another, and how your company needs both to share its services successfully. Marketing develops leads from which your sales strategy can convert into leads.
Yes, that is a lot of gobbledygook.
To break down those positions, let’s bring in a tried and true sports metaphor that everyone can relate to: golf. Imagine marketing as the drive shot, the big one that is supposed to land the ball somewhere near the hole. Conversely, the sales department putts the ball into the hole. See the metaphor? Marketing develops the leads for your business and sales converts them into sales, the final push.
The further the ball is from the hole, the harder it is to putt into the hole. Similarly, the less effective your marketing, the harder it is for your sales team to convert the leads into sales. Therefore, the trick to “automating” your services is to build a robust marketing program.
Setting Up a Marketing System in 3 Steps:
Simplify
Build your niche. Know your customer. Know your product. Know how you can serve your customer and market and why your service is valuable.
For instance, what are their goals, what are their problems, how will you help them? In essence, you need to know why your product is necessary, who it will help and how.
Your marketing starts with your one product for your niche customer. The one product enables you to focus marketing on a single issue, which eliminates extraneous concerns that distract from the ultimate goal of getting sales.
For example, when I started my business I utilized a complicated sales funnel that combined multiple products and upsells. While my business made money, the complaints I received were just as high.
My customers felt swindled, “why weren’t you upfront?” was a common question. The upsell might generate income but it also costs your clients trust in you. When you simplify down to a single, niche product, your customers know what they are getting and will thank you for it. Once you establish a foundation of trust, you can build into more complicated sales funnels and product offerings.
Automate
Once you have your simplified product and offer, you now perfect your marketing strategy. The goal is to create an automated system that relieves you of the burden of continually monitoring progress. Internet marketer Alex Jeffreys utilizes a proprietary system called the TeleFunnel, which automates the sales funnel.
Without going into too much detail, the basic premise of the TeleFunnel is that it automates your marketing process. You develop a “bank” of marketing materials to ensure that you can anticipate bumps that might throw off your marketing schedule. You develop automatically triggered responses based on client interactions. For example, the same pop-up offer every time a client clicks on a particular link.
Marketing to Clients
Once you set up your automated marketing program, it is time to find clients. Social media is a hot marketing tool that can easily drive traffic to your website. Through Facebook ads, you can target people who are already interested in the product you are selling. From there, your phone starts to ring, and now you are making sales.
As people call you, they will ask questions (which you have already anticipated) and you can answer them competently and quickly. You develop your company into a resource for your clients, and now they trust and want to do business with you.
You can use the same tactics to generate an email list. The email list allows you to develop even more tailored products, launch offers, and more to your stream of income. The more you develop your customer base, the more you know about them and the more you can help them. This becomes a super funnel of information that drives traffic to your business.
Combining the Pieces Into a Money-Making Machine
First, build your foundation (e.g., who is your customer, why do they need you, and how will you help them). Second, streamline (automate) your marketing system by developing a TeleFunnel with “triggered” responses. Finally, advertise to the people who need your product on social media and start making money.
