Why do we hesitate to move forward with a marketing plan, or that sales call? Fear.
When you are thinking about your marketing strategy, think specifically.
Do you ever find yourself saying things like “I want us to make a larger impact next year” or “We need to focus on increasing sales”.
Both are great ideas, but when it comes to creating a strategy, you will want to be more specific than that. Let’s think about literally looking at an A to B scenario.
You are at point A, and you want to get to point B. Notice we are not trying to get from point to point… but from A to B; those are different. If you move from point to point, you are still on point, so how can you know that you succeeded?
So you want to “make a larger impact”? Maybe your Point A is 637 followers on your company’s Facebook page and Point B is 2,400 followers. This is an A to B change that you can create a strategy to achieve.
If you need to “increase sales,” then by how much? If you currently are selling 100 widgets, and you want to increase to 200, THAT will allow you to create a strategy for growth.
You say, “but I don’t know how to get there.” I understand. The key is to work forward AND backward.
The forward movement:
- research your market
- brainstorm ways to communicate with your market
- take action by planning how each of these would fit into a sales and marketing process
NOW SWITCH
The backward movement requires that you reverse engineer your action plan after you’ve decided on a few possible routes and see which might be most effective.
Think like this:
- if the end is the sale, what happens just before the sale?
- if a meeting happens before the sale, what happens just before the meeting?
- if a phone call happens before the meeting, what happens just before the phone call?
- if an email message happens before the phone call, what happens before the email?
Next, the question is about the scale (or the length from point A to point B). How much ground do you have to cover? Are you trying to move from selling 10 widgets to selling 20? 100 to 200?
How many people do you THINK you need to communicate with to hit your mark? Think about your “close rate” in the past. How many sales do you get when you have a meeting? How many phone calls do you need to have before you get a meeting? How many email messages before you can line up a phone call?
When you work backward and realize that much of sales and marketing is a numbers game, it gives you the confidence to move forward fearlessly, knowing that the results are sure to come. You don’t have to be afraid, because you understand that you can’t even get to the “yes” without a “no.”
Decide what marks you want to hit, create a strategy and go to work! Be fearless!
