SALES AS PART OF THE MARKETING STRATEGY

IF IT DOESN’T SELL, IT ISN’T CREATIVE

David Ogilvy

I start this article with a quote by David Ogilvy, who is in my mind and I’m not alone here for sure, the most important marketing practitioner of the 20th century, to emphasize a statement that should be embedded in the minds of business professionals from the very beginning - sales is a part of marketing, not two separate entities. Sales is a tactic used within the marketing strategy.?

This is a fundamental truth often neglected in business, especially in B2B. Today businesses see sales and marketing as two different entities and doing that is like getting two basketball teams and making them play on different courts. We see Marketing more as advertising, social media, branding, paid ads, etc., and sales as a team of people who force themselves into the lives of our potential clients. This approach hinders Your effectiveness.?

Let’s get back to basics for a second. Remember the 4 P’s of Marketing - the cornerstone of Today's business realm. PRODUCT, PRICE, PLACE, PROMOTION = Your “marketing strategy”. Marketing is all about getting Your product or service out to the right people and at the right price for Your business to make a profit. (Some of You would probably like to argue that now it is 7 or 8 P’s or 4 C’s, but I don't want to get into that here because that's not the point I want to make. )

Allow me a summary of each P before I go on, just to provide a perspective and add a note that each P deserves its separate article, so I’m only touching the surface here.

Product (or service) - the physical or intangible offering that a company provides to its customers. It includes the design, features, quality, packaging, branding, and any additional services or warranties associated with the product or service. In other words, it’s the value You provide to Your customers.

Price - ?the amount of money customers are willing to pay for the product or service. Setting the right price is crucial, as it not only affects the company's profitability but also influences consumer perception and purchasing decisions. This is Your positioning.?

Place - the strategies and channels used to make the product or service accessible to the target market. It encompasses decisions related to distribution channels, retail locations, online platforms, and logistics. This is Your distribution.

Promotion - encompasses all the activities a company undertakes to communicate the value of its product or service to the target audience. This includes advertising, sales promotions, public relations, social media marketing, and any other methods used to create awareness and generate interest in the offering. This is attention.?

Now, to which P would You incorporate B2B sales? If Your first thought was “It depends” You’re right. The confusion should lie between Place and Promotion. Now this differs between B2B product marketing or SaaS and B2B high-volume service marketing. In the first case, sales is often the means of finally delivering the product or service to the final customer – “meet with the consultant or live demo”. But in high-volume service marketing, the sales area is part of the Promotional P of marketing. This is all about marketing communications, how the messages of benefits and features are delivered to the customers to promote purchases. Sales teams gather the requirements and pain points of clients which are then processed by the delivery team. However, whichever way you place it, a part of the Place P or the Promotional P, sales is always an integral part of marketing and not a separate discipline.

Therefore sales must be kept close to marketing, working in tandem as one department if possible. I understand that when the structure gets too big, separation is a good idea due to organizational chaos. Nonetheless, It’s always one strategy and one goal to follow for both. Using the same messages, targeting the same personas, and reviewing the efforts together. Yet in 90% of the cases, sales and marketing departments meet only infrequently, without meaning, and out of necessity. Marketing and sales roll their eyes over each time they need to talk or more importantly LISTEN to one another. Pretend to cooperate only on networking events. This brings me back to times when I was working in restaurants and Kitchen staff and floor staff seemed to be constantly at war with each other while fighting on the same side. This creates dangers of sending out mixed messages and confusing potential clients, while at the same time damaging the brand and more importantly, Your revenue!

Uff! I’m happy to get this off my chest finally. And sincerely hope this resonates with You. Because this leads to an understanding of how important it is for Your business to follow a consistent marketing strategy. What is a marketing strategy? Here we need to stop for a second and explain the differences between business goals, marketing goals strategy, and tactics because we tend to get all of those a little mixed up.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat".

Art of war

Examples:

Brand strategy statement - we build software that matters by focusing on high-quality of code that we deliver to our Med tech industry clients. So that each of our employees can feel pride in their work, and their satisfaction will be reflected by the confidence our Clients place in us.?

Business goal - Become a top 3 med tech service provider in Europe

Marketing goal Q1 - Generate 50 med tech leads a month, and convert those to 5 new clients minimum.

Marketing strategy for Q1 and 2 of 2024 - to allocate our focus on outbound marketing while at the same time working on a digital rebrand of our company. Limiting the expense rates of paid advertising and presence on online directories.?

Marketing tactics - 1. Targeting the right personas with our LinkedIn direct outreach, 2. Targeting partnerships with cold email outreach. 3. Limiting expenses for paid advertising to a maximum of 2000 USD a month, 4. Focusing our “creative time” on improving our digital presence sacrificing our social media presence. 5. Cancelling CLUTCH paid plans.?

Explanation:

Before diving into strategies and tactics, it's imperative to distinguish goals from strategies. Goals are aspirational and singular. However, goals articulate desired outcomes without detailing how they will be achieved, and what is often labeled as a strategy may be a goal. To align your business and marketing goals effectively, utilize a marketing strategy that illustrates how these goals add commercial value to your business.

The terms "strategy" and "tactics" are often thrown around interchangeably, but in the realm of marketing, they carry distinct meanings. Many marketers set goals without developing a comprehensive marketing strategy to guide them. This oversight leads them to jump straight from goals to tactics, bypassing the critical strategy in between. The consequences of this oversight are measurable by high churn and low conversion rates.

A marketing strategy outlines a set of clear choices that dictate what you will do (and, just as crucially, what you won't). Essentially, your marketing strategy is your roadmap that outlines how you will reach and engage your target audience while demonstrating how these efforts contribute to achieving your marketing and business goals. While tactics are the specific activities employed to execute your strategy.?

In the realm of digital marketing, strategies can border numerous tactics, such as posting targeted content on social media, blogs that lead to enhanced website visibility and SEO, utilizing backlinks for improved search engine ranking, and running targeted ads. These tactics may even consist of smaller components, forming a comprehensive approach to achieve a specific result. However, all these diverse tactics are in the realm of a marketing strategy.

In simpler terms, a marketing goal is your destination, a business goal is what you aspire to achieve upon reaching it, your marketing strategy is the roadmap, and your tactics are the tools you employ to go about the journey. Ensuring all your marketing tactics align under one roof of your marketing strategy is crucial. This holistic approach ensures that every tactic contributes to inching you closer to your ultimate goal. How do marketing strategies and tactics collaborate to achieve a single goal? By making everyone in the team work closely together.

Our goal is to have a nice vacation in Italy. Our strategy is to book everything ourselves and make it an adventure. Our tactic is to take a van and drive there booking every stay last minute on the road. And petrol bought on the road is the tool that fuels our tactics. - That’s how I usually explain it. ;)

How to choose the right tactics? Talk to Your clients and ask for feedback, this will become a good reference point for choosing the right tools for the client-facing part of Your team. Start with creating an ICP and BP and those I covered in one of my last articles. Read here : https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-sell-b2b-1-blazej-dziuk-67ccf/