Stop Relying on “Random Acts of Sales & Marketing”!

Three weeks ago, Marie and I each had two prospect meetings. As we debriefed, it was as if we had the same meeting but on two different topics. Marie’s was marketing and mine was sales. In both cases what we heard was a lot of wishful thinking, and lots of money spent with virtually no real strategy, process, or plan to ensure 2017 is better than 2016. Guess what the 3 musts to success in sales and marketing are?

1. Strategy

My business partner, Marie uses the phrase ‘random acts of marketing’. I sure know what those look like and you might be doing some of them yourself. It’s that knee-jerk reaction to the so-called social selling craze. The MUST to be on Twitter, Periscope, Snapchat, etc. It’s the belief of “if I only had a better website, then they would call me.” Producing videos that don’t speak to the audience and futilely grasping at the latest and greatest. Or worst of all, handing over a fist full of cash to the nice guy in your networking group that convinced you he had the magic wand, but now you want to punch him every time you see him!

These investments rarely work and can almost always guarantee to be a waste of money, time, resources, emotions, and opportunity costs. Unfortunately, businesses run like this all the time and the ownership wonders why they struggle with market awareness, consistent messaging, and real Marketing Qualified Leads.

How do I fix it? Take the time to get QUALIFIED consultation and recommendations for strategy. Then, be sure to understand the strategy and make a commitment to follow through on the complete strategy. Marie has a hard and fast rule: it’s a no-go if it has to be done in under 6 weeks. That goes for a conference, an email campaign, or anything else that you want ROI from.  We offer our clients strategy, implementation, ongoing execution, automation, and ultimately TRACKABLE and QUANTIFIABLE REVENUE. Isn’t that what marketing should be doing?

2. Process

I take tremendous pride in doing my job to the best of my ability, both selling and teaching sales. It makes me sad when I hear my profession be diminished and criticized. Then I quickly realize that we have no one to blame but ourselves because most salespeople are ill-equipped to succeed. They are often poorly trained (if at all), poorly led, poorly coached, poorly managed, and incentivized in horribly outdated ways.

Simply ask yourself, would you go to a dentist that wasn’t trained or had no plan? Send your kids to a teacher with no certificate? Trust a doctor, mechanic, jeweler, dry cleaner, or a pilot who is ‘winging it’?

Of course not! So what makes anyone think that you want to buy from an untrained and unprofessional sales person who lacked a process? What makes us think we should be selling when we’re not properly equipped with a process? Look, sales is a profession – one that should be respected and appreciated by those of us who sell (EVERYONE READING THIS) and those of us who buy (EVERYONE READING THIS). If you’re a lawyer, accountant, chiropractor, plumber, or any other professional service, stop your ‘random acts of sales’ and get trained to be the best you can at client acquisition.

3. Plan

Are you set for 2017? Do you expect 2017 to look like 2016 or does your plan insist that it will be better? Listen, don’t get caught looking back at the end of Q1 and see that you’ve done nothing new to ensure your success. Here are a few points to consider:

A. Is my networking really working or do I waste my time ‘net-eating’, ‘net-drinking’, and ‘net-chatting’? Networking needs to bring you ROI! If it doesn’t then stop, re-evaluate, and realign to a new group. If you need help, let me know.

B. Set very specific goals and then set the course to achieve them. There is nothing worse than being on the hamster wheel of business only to run and run but fail to advance.

What I want you to do now is simply decide: are you going to try something new and talk to with a successful sales and marketing team or do you want to forge ahead on your own? @Revenue offers a variety of training, education, and full consulting services. So the real question is: are you failing to plan, or planning to fail?