Why You Need Marketing, not Just Sales

I have had several clients who are so busy running around doing personal selling that they have little time to run their businesses. It seems to happen more around the $2-3 million gross revenue point, but it can happen at lower targets as well. Why is this? When a business is small, it doesn’t take as many clients or customers to cover costs. And the shortest, least expensive path to getting customers seems to be sales (I say “seems”, because there are better ways to combine the two). Naturally, as the business grows, it takes more money to cover expenses, which means the company needs to do more business, and therefore more selling.

You Can’t Clone Yourself

Many businesses of this size may have an extra salesperson or two. But the owner makes the best salesperson, because they have the most knowledge. Finding and hiring an owner clone can be difficult and expensive. Plus, the new person will require training and management – more time the owner may not have to spare. Sometimes the owner is the only one that can close the bigger deals. Or the owner may just not be comfortable taking a chance on someone else doing it. For many prospects, only the owner will do.

A Crucial “P”

Businesses of this size typically don’t do much in terms of marketing. What I mean by marketing here is the promotional side; one of the crucial four “P’s” (product, price, place, promotion). The value of marketing in this sense is to drive customers to your business, rather than always chasing after them.

Marketing promotions involves strategic planning and the marketing mix. The “mix” includes personal selling, public relations, events, advertising, Web marketing, etc. You may have noticed that I included selling in the mix, which is not atypical of most marketing textbooks. I may get a lot of flack for this, but personal selling is part of the mix; not something that should stand apart from marketing. This does not diminish its importance. It simply implies that all the elements have to work together to effectively and efficiently accomplish the goal – that is to grow the revenue of the company.

Why Marketing Promotions Makes Sense

There are two key benefits to this approach. One, less time is spent chasing customers: sourcing leads, prospecting, cold calling and following up. In fact, marketing is great for warming up those cold calls.

Two, people who contact the business (rather than the other way around) are in a buying mood. That is, they’re interested and they want it now. It could be called judo marketing, because they're already leaning in the direction you want them to go.

If you play your cards right, you can have your website and materials do most of the selling (ahem, marketing) for you. In other words, save the close for the close. That’s a huge time saver. And having people come to you first, gives you the upper hand and places you in a better negotiating position, so you may even be able to get a better price.