The Relationship Between Marketing And Sales

When comparing marketing with sales and considering how they relate to one another I always think of the medium sized business where I had my first job. The marketing department people were serious and analytical, always busy with statistics and campaigns and meetings. The sales people were breathless, always on the go, always on the phone or going to meet customers, always on the cusp of some enormous deal, some magic sale that would catapult the company's turnover way over the annual target. As a junior it seemed to me that the marketing people and the sales people were from two different planets. I now know that they were simply two parts of the same continuum.

Marketing can be described as the set of activities that are undertaken in order to generate leads, while selling is the act of turning a prospect a hot lead into a buyer and later a repeat customer. The marketing and sales functions of any organization are glued together by leads. If there are no leads, the two will fall foul of one another. I saw this in that business I was describing earlier. But leads work both ways. The marketing department has to deliver them and the sales department must act upon them to maximum advantage. But leads must first be generated and that is why marketing tends to overwhelm the sales function when the two are discussed.

The various forms that marketing takes are well known because they are so visible. They range from cold canvassing to brand or corporate advertising, through to the more targeted types of marketing such as direct response advertising and referrals, where the particular benefits of the product is explained to the customer. If this is done properly, then qualified prospects will actually approach the sales people for assistance. Sales people love those leads. It is in fact when the sales people take over the communication function that the lead ceases to be a lead and becomes a prospective customer, then a customer and finally a repeat customer.

Actually I have painted a somewhat idealistic picture of the lead relationship between the marketing function and the sales function. It is just not that simple because not all leads are equal. An extremely tiny percentage leads are customers who are ready to buy. Most of them are merely interested in possibly buying at a future date and some are just mildly interested, just browsing. That's why it is important to have some sort of lead management system so that potential customers can be turned into buyers and buyers can become repeat customers.

All follow up communication should be friendly and informative, definitely not hard sell. The company representative should be regarded as a helpful expert rather than a rabid sales person. Fortunately many of the follow up functions can be automated to take the form of email, direct mail, voice broadcast and fax broadcast. Obviously the lead would be encouraged each time to call directly if they have questions or a ready to buy. The follow up effort is usually a function of the marketing and sales departments combined.

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What Are Examples of Marketing Tools?

Well, this depends on what kind of marketing you are referring to. If you are researching for more information for offline marketing tools, these would consist of things like your local yellow pages, signs, billboards, radio, newspapers, etc. Offline advertising methods have two major disadvantages:

First, they are very expensive. Businesses spend tons of advertising dollars every year on these offline marketing tools.

Second, most of these methods only reach out to a small geographical area. Phone books and newspapers are only distributed to the local population. Signs and billboards are only seen by the people who drive by them everyday. This might work just fine for the local contractor for example, who can only service a small geographical area. However, if your business has the ability to service an area much larger than your local population, you might need to look at another option.

Now, I would like to finish answering your question of, "what are examples of marketing tools," with my personal favorite kind of marketing:

The world-wide web offers you a tremendous opportunity to market your business. Online marketing methods offer you the ability to dramatically expand your advertising efforts, because you are not limited to the local area that you reside in. Internet marketing tools can be broken down in two areas:

You have the paid advertising methods, which would consist of things like pay-per-click, banner ads, solo ads, etc. These tools offer you immediate results within minutes after you implement them, but they come with a price. You also have free marketing methods, which consist of methods like article marketing, video marketing, blogs, and social media to name a few. While these marketing tools do not offer you immediate results, they do however offer you tremendous long-term results, and can drive a multitude of traffic to your website over time.

Now, before you try to implement these Internet marketing tools on your own, I encourage you to enroll in a reputable online marketing course. You can waste a lot of time and money if you do not know how to properly market your business online. There is a learning curve involved in Internet marketing, and a marketing course will teach you the techniques and strategies that are used by Internet Marketing professionals. These marketing tools are relatively simple to learn, and will ensure that you are getting the best results out of your marketing efforts.

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Training Network Marketing - Online Marketing Strategy

Network Marketing Leaders, Professional and Reps search for the extremely coveted and sometimes elusive online marketing strategy. Is it really that hard to understand why? Training network marketing masterminds begins with piecing together the magic traffic formula that top online marketers know like the back of their hand. Success online is next to impossible... unless you have a solid strategy. Your online network marketing strategy is going to be the foundation on which your future online success is laid upon. So lets look at a proven strategy that is working today.

For Top Online Marketing Masterminds who sometimes guard their secrets, the online network marketing strategy below is plain and simple. Online lead generation mastery is key to building your primary business.

The Online Network Marketing Strategy

1.) Build Your List

2.) Building a Relationship With Your List

3.) Monetizing Your List

Build Your List

Well, you know that sounds simple enough... Right? The real key to putting this strategy into action is knowing what to do and exactly how to do it. In order to build your list in the first place you need to offer something of value compelling enough to have a potential customers, clients or prospect actually opt into your list. The problem to solve now becomes how to create that compelling value. The solution is simple you learn how. Keep on reading this article to find out why you need to develop a list in the first place.

Building a Relationship With Your List

How do you build a relationship with a list? You build a relationship with your list through a permission marketing strategy. Permission Marketing requires the use of a blog, website or webpage with a permission based opt in form built into them. Permission is granted to you once someone submits their name email address and possibly their phone number. Most people use a service like Aweber for their auto-responder opt in forms. This is a paid service that confirms that new subscribers really requested information from you. Once a subscriber is confirmed your daily, weekly or monthly messages begin being sent. Subscribers can also cancel their subscription to you by opting out or canceling their subscription to you.

You now have permission to send written emails messages to your list. They key strategy here is to become a solutions provider. For example; this article may provide solutions for fellow network marketing professional leaders and reps that want to learn online marketing strategies. What you write in your emails should create value and trust in form of awesome information, products, services and even highly recommended business opportunities. These should be products, services or business partnerships you won't be afraid to be associated with or put you name on.

Sounds like pretty tuff stuff here but don't worry because there are marketing systems that have built in self branded value based auto-responder messages pre-made for you related to the network marketing industry. The pre-made messages can actually plug right into auto-responder accounts like Aweber. This solves the problem of having to write your own messages until you are ready to do so. This was one of the awesome tools that helped me decide to get started with internet network marketing.

Monetizing Your List

Ok, you're building your list and building a relationship with your list,.. now what? Lets learn a little bit about monetizing your list. It has been proven that people will buy from people they know like and trust. So if you've been establishing a great relationship with your list by creating value, your list will already feel like they know and trust you. This means they will have no problem purchasing from you now and into the future.

Every purchase of your recommended information, training, programs or products, funds your online lead generation efforts even when many don't actually join you in your primary business. This commonly referred to as a self- funded proposal. A good marketing system will have training products services and even live network marketing training webinars you can invite your list to attend.

Discover The Online Network Marketing Strategy System and Blueprint

So far I've only revealed "The Strategy" to you because this article is getting a little too long for my standards, which is about 450 to 700 words.

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Factors Affecting Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy:
Marketing strategy consists of some valuable plans that integrate an organization's marketing goals. The Proper combination of goals, policies, and action sequences makes the marketing strategies effective. The main aim of marketing strategy is to increase the sales and profits of any organization or company.

Marketing strategy is developed by considering the following factors:

Environment analysis and marketing research:
The observation of external factors that promote success or failure of a company is a most important marketing strategy. The external factors include economy, competition, atmosphere, transport system and solicitation of data to resolve special marketing issue.

Market selection:
For better sales of a product, market selection is significant. The amount of sales of a product depends on the location of the market, whether the market is situated in urban or rural areas; whether the market place is easily accessible for people.

Consumer analysis:
The consumer characteristics such as taste, choice and preference affect the product marketing. The consumer characteristic varies from man to man and location to location. So inspection of consumer characteristics, needs and purchase processes is also important.

Product planning (including foods, services, and ideas):
Product planning includes the development of existing product by changing of the composition, packaging system, product positions, brands and deletion of the old products.

Distribution planning:
The delivery system of the product to various markets, shopping malls and restaurants is also considered for marketing strategy. The distance from the production place to whole or retail seller, transportation system, physical distribution, allocation of goods, wholesaling detailing, inventory management and channel relations are reasonable factors for distribution planning.

Price planning:
Price of a product should be kept in tolerable range for all classes of people so that they can easily pay for the product. If the price of the product becomes very high, the consumer will not buy the product.

Communication Planning:
The communication planning may include the advertising about the product through different mass media, such as the television, radio, newspaper. The more a company publishes, the more it sells. At the recent time, online advertising is another media of publicity. By advertising the companies or organizations gets the chance of focusing their product's good quality and urging the customers to buy their products.

Brand name:
Brand name of a company has a large effect on the consumer to make them buy their product. A company should select a nice and attractive family brand for its better publicity.

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Does Marketing Work?

I was at a networking event the other day, explaining to someone what we did. In response, I received a smile back and the comment "well, marketing doesn't really work anyway does it?"

Interesting question! And I can completely understand why he said that. For a lot of small business owners, that's exactly what they find - that marketing doesn't work. The result is that many business owners feel frustrated with marketing and give up on the process, choosing to rely instead on referrals and word of mouth.

But actually the answer to the question "Does marketing work?" is yes, absolutely. In order to make it work for you though, it's important to understand why marketing doesn't work.

There are three main reasons why marketing doesn't work for small businesses:

1. Whenever you do some marketing, it's important to understand that not everything you do will get you business. What I mean by this is that most of the marketing methods you use will be great a making people aware of what you do and will also be good for building your reputation as an expert. However, there are very few marketing activities that are just good at getting you customers. There's something else you need to do to accomplish this which I'll come onto in a minute.

2. The second reason is that most business owners don't follow up with people. They do a marketing activity just once and when they don't get the results they're looking for, they just drop that and move onto something else. Marketing though requires persistence and once you have contacted someone, you must follow-up in order to properly see results.

3. The final reason is just not doing marketing. Marketing can be very frustrating especially if you're not seeing results. As a result, after a while, most small business owners just give up and rely on word of mouth and referrals so not doing marketing is another big reason why marketing doesn't work.

So what do you do about these three reasons? Well, here's how to make marketing work for you.

The first thing we need to do is turn marketing activities into customers. To do this, whatever marketing activity you choose, you MUST find a way to capture the contact details of people. The easiest way to do this is to offer them something that's free and of value to them. If people give you their contact details, what they're telling you is that they're interested in what you do. It's now up to you to find out how interested they are.

How we do this is to follow up with people. I'm not talking about hassling people here. I'm talking about building a relationship with them so that they feel comfortable buying from you. As they say, we do business with people that we know, like and trust, so the more people know you, the easier they will find it to work with you.

Once you understand this basic principle of marketing and find that it does work for you, hopefully you'll be more motivated to do marketing. This is absolutely vital if you want to get business from your marketing. Especially in these turbulent times, it's not enough to sit back and wait for business to knock on your door. You have to go out there and generate it.

So, marketing does work. You just have to know how to work the system to your advantage. Have a go and see if this difference works for you.

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Techniques of Cluster Marketing

If you turn on your "Go Back In Time" machine, you'll find that Cluster Marketing has been around for a long  time.  Little has changed over the centuries since the business world stumbled upon the concept.  In its simplest definition Cluster Marketing means, "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket." In other words, "don't spend all of your marketing budget on one media or in one geographical area."

Conventional Marketing Strategies

The New York 5th Ave. advertising power houses have lead the way in America with their big dollar advertising campaigns which only the corporate giants can afford.  Before they design an advertising campaign they first design a marketing plan.  They identify their target market by geography, age, sex, social economic values, hobbies, house size, shoe size, shirt size, etc.  Some market strategies can use as many as a hundred or more parameters to define their target market.  Sounds excessive doesn't it?  Not really when you consider that mega dollars in potential sales are at stake.  Many advertising firms and marketing executives have lost their jobs when a marketing strategy and advertising plan has failed.

The conventional strategy has been to use various advertising media such as TV commercials, newspaper ads, direct mail advertising, radio commercials, etc.  All of these methods require a lot of money up front to produce and distribute.  Their focus has been on getting the buyer to look in the direction of the product and create a need in the potential customer to buy their product.  Cluster marketing strategies are used to define which media will be used to advertise the product and where the product will be sold.

Let's look at an example where advertisements are created for the newspaper and direct mail advertising.  These are two of the oldest methods still in use.  They both use printed media and are the easiest conventional advertising methods to produce.  In a small town, using both methods might be excessive because statistics have shown that in most small towns the majority of people subscribe to the local newspaper and newspaper ads are cheaper to produce than direct mail advertising.  In larger cities, however, both methods would be needed to cover the whole city since the number of subscribers to the local newspaper are substantially less as to the size of the population.  In this example, the parameter of the number of newspaper subscribers is also used in the marketing plan.

Cluster marketing strategies analyze the target market using diverse combinations of geography, population densities, and personal parameters to develop geographic areas of interest.  In marketing, these areas are referred to as clusters or groups of interest.  The clusters are identified so that either single or multiple target markets are used for the advertising plan.  Clusters (geographic areas) that have the same target market potential can be geographically close or hundreds of miles apart.  With today's mass communications the distance doesn't matter to the modern marketing executive's plans.

Internet Cluster Market Strategies

The growth of the Internet has lead to the development of a whole new dynamic in cluster marketing strategy.  The Internet has consolidated many parameters. As an example, age groups have been reduced to children, young adults, adults, and senior adults. Previously, these categories were treated with greater detail. Language is no longer a dominant value and buying habits are now measured down to the individual instead of age groups.  The search engines now create massive databases of the sites people visit and which ones they buy from.

Conventional marketing strategies develop "one way" links from the advertisement to the location where the product can be purchased whereas Internet marketing strategies develop "one way" and "multiple" links to where you can find all of the sites where the products are sold.  It also develops additional links to extensive content that describes everything we really didn't care to know about the products.  That content also presents us with additional links to more content and numerous locations where the products can be found.

Marketing executives are also having a great time spending less money on advertising by offering affiliate programs where web site owners advertise the product for free in hopes of gaining a commission when the product is sold. Large numbers of affiliates means a lot of free advertising.

All of these aspects are increasing the dynamics of Cluster Marketing on the Internet.  Demographic and sales data is accumulated in large databases and sold to marketing executives and advertisers for large dollar figures.  These databases, plus very sophisticated analysis programs, provide many clusters of potential marketing areas.

What About the Internet Entrepreneur

While the big money marketing executives are slaving away over their big databases and their numerous marketing clusters the Internet entrepreneur is grinning like a "fox in the hen house" and making some big dollars without the fancy marketing cluster strategies.  The Internet has made it possible for the entrepreneur to simplify the cluster marketing theory into a very simplistic model.

Let's look at some basic facts:

1. Geographic clusters have been consolidated into one Internet on-line world. The Internet is the world and a very large number of people use it every day.
2. Search engines have cataloged the online world and continue to update that catalog every minute.  Free tools are now available to Internet entrepreneurs to analyze that data on their laptops without having to pay for the use of that data.
3. Cluster demographics have been replaced by "keywords" and "long tail keywords."
4. Age demographics have been consolidated to children, adults, and seniors.  Yes, even children are making big money with their creative web sites.
5. The corporate marketing executive is being replaced by young Internet savvy marketeers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content managers.  These fresh young minds are raking in the dollars, even in a down economy.
6. "One way links" are being replaced with "multi-way links" in web sales pages and clustered articles.
7. Article Directories and Social Network sites are providing massive amounts of FREE authoritative links to product sites that conventional marketing executives just can't understand. These executives will soon be a relic in our modern Internet civilization.
8. Cluster marketing on the Internet is no longer about geographic boundaries.  The Internet entrepreneur has learned that on the Internet today you cluster methods and sites like EzineArticles, YouTube, FaceBook, Squidoo, HubPages, Twitter, Slideshare, etc., not demographic clusters. Also, countries still retain their own language identity, but the Internet has broken down most of that barrier in Internet marketing. The web logs of every Internet site are full of sources from all over the world giving testimony to the fact that the Internet is now a world marketing cluster unto itself.

While the big corporations have been branching out to the Internet for several years, Internet cluster marketing strategies have made it possible for the individual in our society to earn more on the Internet than some of those big corporations.

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Heuristics As a Marketing Concept

In a psychological sense, heuristics are simple, unconscious rules of thumb that every one of us has created to make decisions and solve problems. They are "if this, then that" statements that we formulate to govern our actions when faced with choices.

Heuristics have been around as long as we have. But as the information revolution continues to flood us with more and more details about every subject imaginable, and our daily schedules get fuller and fuller, their existence has become more apparent. We need ways to make workable decisions without getting overwhelmed. And heuristics let us do that, at least most of the time.

The main features of heuristics are that they:

• tend to be simple and easy to mentally compute;

• are relatively few in number; and

• are often "surrogates" for other attributes/benefits

It is worth noting that a stumbling block of heuristics is that they may lead us into stereotypes or nonsequiturs that lead to wrong decisions. For example, "if it is popular, then it must be safe," or "if it's high priced, it must be better" may not serve as good heuristics, since the first quality has no relation on the second. Overall, though, the benefits of using heuristics outweigh the risks, because they help us simplify our decisions into manageable proportions and more often than not give us workable, if not great, results.

So heuristics help us navigate an increasingly complex world on a day to day basis without going crazy from all the stimuli that come at us. What does that have to do with marketing?

Your customers and prospects use heuristics every day when making buying decisions, and that includes the decision about buying from you. The use of heuristics, and common use of familiarity as one of the rules (as in "I know this brand, so I'll trust it), is what makes branding and positioning so important. In the services arena, concepts like "mind share" and "thought leadership" are important because buyers of intangibles such as services will buy from companies they perceive as experts. During my tenure at a Fortune 500 technology corporation, we constantly faced the challenge of selling our enterprise IT services to the customer's executive suite in spite of great value and expertise. Why? Because we were competing with far more recognizable names than ours, and we discovered that a common executive heuristic is "If it's a well-known company, the board will easily approve and I won't get into trouble if it doesn't work."

What heuristics does your market use when deciding whether to buy your products or services? Better yet, what heuristics do you want used to lead to a buying decision in your favor. If you market to meet the right criteria, you are more likely to get and keep the right kind of customer for your business.

For example, my own company is a virtual service business, which means that I want clients who are comfortable obtaining the kinds of services I offer via the Internet with little, if any, real time interaction. So I market where there are service companies that want to work virtually with a marketing consultancy.

I also target what I think of as "personality" heuristics. The header of my coaching website, Success in Sweatpants, is a prime example: It is a good reflection of my attitude and inclusion of humor in my approach. Anyone who finds the header dumb or unprofessional is not very likely to contact me, which reflects a heuristic of my own: If you don't think that purple sweatpants, pink bunny slippers, and a laptop belching money are at least a little bit amusing, you shouldn't work with me.

I assert that it is worth the energy to figure out the buying heuristics that you want to appeal to and evaluate whether you are indeed meeting those criteria in your marketing. You may be surprised at what you learn, and it may make the difference between so-so marketing and breaking through to a new level of success.

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