Leverage Marketing Services as a Model

Featured Person: Chad Root, Spearhead Sales and Marketing, President/Founder

Intro:

CR: This is Chad with Spearhead Sales and Marketing. This is our second video and last week I interviewed Mr. Rick Horn. He’s been a sales manager for decades, very successful, grew a business from 6 million to 250 million. We sat down and I asked him some questions about what made salespeople more successful than others. He told us three things last week: 1) Know how to build rapport 2) Focus on the right relationships 3) Top performing salespeople understand their role and they understand the role of marketing.

That’s what I want to pick up on today and introduce a model to you to help you understand that a little more. As salespeople, Rick continued on to say in today’s world, there are so many more tools. We have social media, blogging, email, text messaging and all sorts of technology that we haven’t had for decades. In the last 5-10 years it’s all kind of culminated into all these tools. It raises the question, what is the role of sales using these tools? What is the role of marketing?

Content:

To answer that question, I want to introduce this model. Roger Martin wrote a book called The Design of Business, he goes on to speak about design thinking and that sort of thing. What I want you to get out of the book is how to run your business from the design point of view. So if we could design the perfect business model, what would that look like if we started from a blank sheet of paper?

As a salesperson/professional you can certainly understand that, there have been times in your career especially early on, that you lean heavily on intuition. You really go with your gut, you feel that the market and innovation for the product make sense.

Where you’ve made the most money is when you get beyond intuition. You actually have a lot of experience in a market, you know a lot of people and you have a track record for success that just continues to multiply.

The third level of this concept is you break it into systems. In sales training, they’ve been teaching salespeople how to systemize their process for years, some get there and some don’t. Quite often, companies that really scale will take what top performing salespeople have done and break those things into systems that insides sales, customer service, and other people might then perform.

The reason I bring this up and bring some complexity to it is to get back to the question, what’s the role of marketing, what’s the role of sales. If you think about salespeople leveraging social media, internet, email, and traditional marketing, what’s their role in using these tools? To keep it simple, if you remember what Rick said last week, the goal of using these tools from a salespeople point of view would be to generate warm calls, not cold calls. We’re trying to figure out at what point do you engage a marketing specialist? The same model would apply.

There are marketers out there that are exploring these new channels, such as the video we’re doing today, texting, social media interactions, and their using their gut to get into it. Once they have some experience they kind of work their way down the funnel to make this more concrete. But they are still using a rule of thumb and at some point, they will break this into a system. For example, mass email, constant contact, MailChimp, these things have been out a long time now. We really don’t see a lot of marketers struggling to use these tools anymore, really simple systems that entry-level operators can step right in and use.

The issue is, at what point does a salesperson wrestle with all these tools directly themselves or turn it over to a marketing person? I’m going to draw a line and highlight and summarize it for you, we will jump more into it next week. Think about it this way, as a salesperson, you can communicate one on one effectively, you can even communicate with 2, 3, or 4 people pretty effectively. Maybe at a sales presentation or discovery meeting, that’s a sales communication. That’s where you use custom powerpoints, brochures, literature, your own tools of the trade. As soon as you try to communicate to a mass audience, imagine doing a Facebook ad/post or sending out an e-blast, now I want you to think of that as a marketing communication. That’s where you will recognize through your own experience, that the marketers have gone through this intuition, experience and formula process and have that feel. Then that’s the time to turn it over.

Notes

• Follow your intuition
• Put your experience to work
• Systemize your process
• Explore and implement innovative technology
• Know your marketing limits
• Sales communication is between a few and a marketing communication is to a large group

Conclusion:

I’m going to close out this video. Just to summarize, we want to introduce thinking about our business from a design point of view, thinking about our experience as sales professionals, and when it is a sales communication versus a marketing communication. That’s all for today, thank you. Thank you for your time! Want some help leveraging marketing to raise awareness for your sales teams? Contact us @ spearheadsalesmarketing.com