Selling meant singing nothing but praises, and getting customers to buy was the only end point for marketing efforts. And then… it changed. Over the years, sales and marketing have become quite sophisticated due in part to evolving consumer behaviors and expectations. Today’s customers are not as so easily wowed by “smoke and mirrors”. It is not enough that marketers say their product is the best. Even ‘New!’ doesn’t work as well any more. We live in an over-saturated — over-messaged – marketplace.
Your understanding of your target customer will influence your marketing and the direct sales communication you have with them and the way you interact and serve them.
Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.
So much of what’s out there today is old thinking. Not old marketing or old sales thinking. But rather, the “silo” approach which separates these functions as if they existed independent of one another. The fact is that they are as dependent on one another as nutrition and exercise are for improving someone’s overall health. Except in a company looking to achieve its revenue and market share goals, the overall health is the ability to impact a specific market.
Great ideas would still fail to attract an audience – money and energy wasted.
Not only money and energy wasted – but also an old way of doing things. What else needed to change? For over 50 years, companies involved in complex or big-ticket sales have dichotomized “developing the message” and “delivering the message”. Even companies that derive the majority of their revenue from their direct sales channel rarely ask their sales teams, “What’s happening out there?” – relying instead on traditional market research and industry experts. Is this a wrong practice? Marketing experts are not typically sales professionals and the converse is usually true. That wasn’t the issue nagging at me. What was “off” was this: why not take advantage of the intense customer-facing resource that is your direct sales force for real-time market intelligence?
