While there are many different departments and pieces to a small business one of the most important and least understood is sales and marketing. Large organizations are very good at differentiating between the two and having them work together to generate a consistent funnel of leads and sales to the organization. However, for small businesses this is an area that is consistently inconsistent and leads to many wasted hours and dollars.
First off, let’s start with the simple fact that sales and marketing are different. Many small businesses group sales and marketing together because of cost and resources while larger businesses have very distinct and different sales and marketing divisions. This is a major hurdle for the small business owner and is a major pain point when I talk to them about wanting to grow the business. The reality for the small business owner is that even without having separate departments, they need to employ separate sales and marketing strategies while also making sure they work together.
There are countless amounts of service providers that offer sales and marketing help for small businesses. In fact, many of these providers offer excellent services at a much more reasonable price than building it out internally. The problem comes with how the business owner implements these services. Way too often when I work with owners and we go through the sales and marketing part, they will say “we use software provider A” for sales and marketing. When I follow up and ask questions about the effectiveness of the software and whether it is part of their sales process or marketing process I get very confused looks.
If you are in this boat, trust me you are not alone. The good thing is, with a little bit of effort and a consistent approach this can become an area of strength for your business and ultimately boost both profitability and the multiple someone will pay to acquire your business.
Before we get into some of the details, let’s take a step back and define marketing. In my view, you should perfect your marketing strategy before you even start considering sales. Marketing can be defined as the activities and processes that communicate and deliver your offerings to your target customer. This definition seems simple enough, but it can be very difficult to implement. At its core you should first have a well-defined brand. This is what identifies your company. Once you know who you are, you need to know who you want to sell to. After that, you need to know where those potential customers are. Then, you need to know how to get your message in front of that customer. This can take a lot of time and effort, and most small business owners have an idea of this in their head. The biggest step is taking it from the owners head and getting it into an actionable strategy. While the purpose of this article is not to go through all the ways you can build your marketing strategy, the simple step of building a strategy, writing it down, and being able to articulate it is where you will instantly get ahead of many other small business owners.
Once you have your marketing strategy in place, then the business owner should develop a sales process. This is where sales and marketing differ and separating the two and making sure they work hand in hand is where the small business owner can really take 1 + 1 and get 3. The sales process should focus on how to take your marketing strategy and turn those leads into clients or customers. This process can vary from business to business. The important thing to do again is make sure that you write down and follow that process. As part of the process you should also track the success of both the amount of leads and the amount of conversions to clients. This is vital for the sales process because it can show you where your strengths and weaknesses are. One of the things I do with clients when we go through our reviews is walk through these strengths and weaknesses and over time you make changes to both the sales and marketing processes to make them more effective.
For the small business owner, even if you can only afford one person that is responsible for both sales and marketing, separating the functions and reporting on them separately will put you in a much better position moving forward. While this requires some work and cost up front, the benefits will be felt for years to come. Sales will increase as sales and marketing complement each other. Margins will increase as you can streamline costs and actually see return on your outsourced marketing and sales functions. This will also lead to exponential growth in the value of your business because the buyer of your company will pay a premium for a business that has a well-defined strategy as opposed to something that is in the owners head.