Tips To Transform Your Marketing & Sales In 2020

One of my good friends, Elin Gutierrez, stops by the office to discuss a variety of game-changing strategies I’ve utilized to grow LaceUp brand. It is my belief that, if implemented today, you too will see a transformation in your sales and marketing endeavors. Below you’ll find a transcript of her questions and my responses: 

What’s more important for the sales process, marketing or sales?

Marketing hands down.

Even though sales are extremely important, you can’t close any deals nor scale out a sales team without an abundance of leads. You want to have so many leads, so much pent-up demand for your product, that you can scale your team out of pure necessity. Old school sales methods will grow your business over time. A great marketing strategy will exponentially transform your business.   

How valuable are the source of leads for your business?

Like the gold rush in California from 1848-1855, marketing is like striking gold. If you can find a successful and consistent flow of leads for your business, you can become very successful. All you do initially is find a strategy that works. Once you’ve found something that works, you pour fuel on the fire to scale it as fast as possible. 

How do you advise someone that is new to this industry?

Content. Content. Content! You must develop your ability to create content that provides value for others. Get good at speaking in front of a camera, writing, and making graphics. Then you must post all of this to the internet without a care of what others think about you. Over time, you will become the expert in your field and customers will flock to purchase your product and/or service.

What are the top marketing tools you should be implementing?

You should all be implementing a social media strategy above and beyond everything else. Why? Because it’s free and all it requires is your sweat equity to get it up and running. Just like you built your business, you want to commit on creating new content every single day for the next few years. The return on this up front is minimal, but long-term the ROI of doing this is tremendous.

Even in 2019 most industries don’t understand the power of social media. They chalk it up as something for kids and newer generations that is for pure entertainment purposes only. The bottom line is that upcoming generations will ONLY be on social media. If you don’t leverage these platforms now, you will lose in the next 5-10 years.

How important is marketing for a small business?

Unless you have an idea that is going to disrupt an industry or change the world, marketing is the single most important component of any business. Let’s face it, most of us have created businesses that are ever so slightly different than the market incumbents. We may offer better service, a better feature, or we may be targeting a different niche. Your hope to stand out by marketing yourself like your life depends on it.

What channel do you focus on?

At first you want to become known in the network that has the attention of your target audience. If it is the B2B space, you want to be on LinkedIn. If you’re targeting Generation Z, you want to be on TikTok. If you’re targeting millennials, you want to be on Instagram. Your goal is to provide value through content for your target audience on their chosen platform. 

Best way to manage a sales team in an organization?

The only way to manage a sales team in an organization is to put goals in place. You want goals that increase commissions when output is increased. Examples include goals for calls per day, goals for new contacts reached per day, and goals for making sales. Once the goals are put in place, now you need to create a culture that adheres to these goals no matter what.

What is your suggestion to improve your closing rate?

The gold is in the follow up, not in the initial phone call. This is the #1 tip to increase your closing rate. You must follow up even if it means “bothering” a prospective client. Remember that your objective is to get a yes or a no from a prospective client and provide value, not to be their friend. Therefore, blow up their phone until you get a Yes or a F#$% No.

What is the importance of a CRM tool?

This is of critical importance. It is the only way that you can track metrics and make sure that your team is hitting their targets. Without a CRM, you are stuck wasting time with a spreadsheet trying to calculate whether your team was able to hit their targets or not. You should be investing time nurturing and improving your team, not calculating metrics in a spreadsheet.

What is the key to increasing sales?

Easy. More content, more follow up, and more calls. At the end of the day, it is unequivocally a numbers game. Your ability to produce more is 100% correlated to your output.

How do you provide value for a prospective employer if you are new to the workforce?

When you go into an interview, you need to make the interview about what you are going produce for the employer. Most people come into an interview talking a big game, yet they can’t deliver. Here are the two alternatives to provide value when going into an interview. 

1.      Come into the interview with proof that you’ve already been successful at marketing. This means developing a large following on social media or having a proven track record of making content that sells.

2.      Present the prospective employer with something unique that you created for them. Bring some value to the table before getting paid a dime. This can be done with a creative video or post that you make for the employer prior to the interview.

When you do your own business, how do you come up with a strategy?

Strategizing as an entrepreneur is one of the hardest things you will ever have to do. When you don’t have structure, you need to be creative. You need to have your goals dictate your output and you need to allocate time to trying new strategies. I would spend a few hours a day, let’s say 6, executing on the things that you know work. I would spend the remainder of your time at work executing on a new strategy that you’ve never done before. This is the only way that you find new tactics to add to your repertoire.