The single most important ingredient for a successful business is having a customer. A customer is more important than a business idea, the technology, financing, management, or anything else. Marketing superstars get and keep customers.
Customers (people) buy to feel good, or solve a problem. Customers value the solution to a problem in two ways: as the avoidance of loss, or as the potential for gain. The loss avoided, or the gain, can always be expressed as a product value. So make people feel good, and give them a real and perceived dollarized value greater than your price and you will sell all you make.
People don’t buy products. They buy what they get from the products. People don’t buy saws, they buy cuts. People don’t buy chlorine, they buy clean pools. Sell the product value of the accurate cut and the clean pool
It is marketers responsibility to know actual value of every product benefit and every product point of difference.
Markets (consumers) are who buy. Products are what they buy. Applications (product benefits and uses) are why they buy. Consequently, every marketing strategy and program must encompass all three who, what, and why elements.
A good way to organize and segment customers for marketing direction is to group them as “aware users,” “aware non-users,” an “unaware.” A good use of time is to ask the aware users why they bought, and to ask aware non-users why the why they did not. Then wrap the answers into strategies to keep the aware uses, to switch the aware non-users, and to attract and get the unawares.
Product quality is marketing responsibility.
Direction to research and development is a marketing responsibility.
Sales are a marketing responsibility. Marketing’s job is to show the salespeople where to walk and to arm them to sell. Sales management’s job is to be sure the salespeople work. Hire salespeople who run.
You can immeasurably increase revenues if you train your sales force how to pre-plan a sales call; how to ask questions, including asking for the order; and how to listen to customer’s answer after each question is asked.
Salespeople will greatly increase their sales if they do two things: (a) always show the customer the dollarized value of the product’s benefits over the entire life use of the product; and (b) on every sales call, ask for the order, or for a commitment to an action that leads directly to an order.
The three most important words in marketing strategy are execution, execution, and execution. If a marketing idea is important, then every single detail in the execution of that idea is important.
Brand names are intellectual assets; often more valuable than tangible assets. The Coke brand, for example, is worth more than all of the Coca-Cola Company’s physical plant and equipment assets. Treat brand names like great paintings; great brands are priceless.
Every product I branded. The brand name might be A280-16-2PD, a lousy brand name, but a name nevertheless. Always use good, customer-tested, on-strategy brand names.
Technology does not sell; marketing sells. The equation for success for technology-based new products is 2 percent technology and 98 percent marketing. Don’t depend on fantastic new technology to sell itself. Nothing sells itself.
One of the most important aspects of becoming a top-producing sales manager is getting your priorities straight. Evaluate your company’s present situation; is sales working up to its potential? If not, you may need to re-organize. Knowing how to establish good working relationship with your sales force and clients […]
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