Three tasks you need to do before any marketing?

Three tasks you need to do before any marketing?:

Before you start any of your marketing, whether it is offline, online or involving social media, you need to do three important tasks. Without these tasks, you are wasting over 90% of your resources, both time and money.

Before I get into the first task, there are some important statistics you need to be aware of.

According to a study published by Marketing Sherpa, 52% of B2B organizations state that lead generation is their biggest challenge.

Another interesting statistic from CSO Insights, a sales and marketing research firm, states that less than 40% of so called “qualified buyers” actually do purchase.

What this is saying is that when you have ten companies that say they are going to buy from you, less than four actually do. And this number doesn’t include the companies your sales people chase that you only “think” might buy from you. From experience, this number includes at least 50% of leads.

This means that are your sales and marketing people are spending over 90% of their time trying to close business that is not going to close.

Have you ever looked at how much time, energy, and money this is costing your company?

These are two very disturbing statistics, and yet most B2B companies simply accept them as a fact of life.

The biggest issue, as I see it, is that most companies don’t actually define what a qualified lead is for their organization.

And because, in today’s Internet world, over 90% of B2B companies find you before you know they are even looking for products and services, like your company offers, you need to tightly define who you want to sell to.

But when I talk to many business owners and executives, they tell me that their products and services can help everyone who has “this” problem, or has “that” installed. If you sell to everybody, you are a commodity, and if you are a commodity, the only way you can compete is on price.

Competing on price can be OK, if you want to dominate a market, and you have very, very deep pockets. But for over 98% of companies, it means you will be out of business in less than three years, and also owe a lot of money. Because it does take an awful lot of money, it is not a very good strategy, even for large companies with deep pockets.

So how do you ensure that you get the right leads, and you spend the right amount of time ensuring these leads will buy soon, and that you won’t waste your time chasing either unqualified leads or tire kickers?

What this means is that you need to define your ideal customer set. You need to understand who it is you will be selling to, both from a company perspective, and who inside that company is your buyer.

You need to do this before you start any marketing, whether it be offline or online. Ironically, very few companies do it and even fewer do it well.

There is a template you can follow, and next time I’ll go through this template with you. However, if you’d like your own copy, I’d be happy to send it to you. Please contact me for a copy.

Until next time, remember, if you get caught in deep powder, keep your ski tips up.

Kind regards,

Ian Dainty 416.277.4537 ian@b2bbusinesscoach.com