Many business owners express confusion regarding the roles of marketing, prospecting and selling.
While they are distinct activities, think of them as three “safe tumblers” locking the door to a stream of ideal clients.
You have to get the combination right.
Starting with marketing.
Marketing is a one to many activity. It’s broadcasting to a wide audience of potential prospects what you specialise in. Why it’s important. What problems your service solves. What outcomes your prospects could get.
By its nature, marketing is passive. You’re waiting for a prospect to contact you. It also relies on your prospects actually seeing your message. Which frankly is leaving things to chance.
Prospecting is a one to one activity where you reach out to one person directly to find out if they have specific issues you solve and are interested in solving them.
At this point all you’re looking for is an initial level of interest to determine if you should take the conversation further.
Selling is inviting an individual to “buy into” your solution.
The sales process is where you delve deeply into your prospect’s issues and if appropriate, present a solution. And invite them to buy.
Each of these activities is a distinct skill set. However, the power comes from meshing all three.
Here’s why.
Your marketing activities place your message in front of potential prospects. Marketing should educate your prospects and help them understand the issues they’re facing.
Done well, it creates a sense of familiarity with your prospects. They see your material and know who you are (even if it’s on an unconscious level). Marketing done well positions you as a credible provider in your space.
So when you actively prospect by reaching out, be it via a LinkedIn message or actually picking up the phone and calling, the sense of familiarity makes it a “warm call”.
You’re far more likely to get a hearing and opportunity to ask whether your prospects have the specific issues you can solve and if they’re open to furthering the discussion. Which is where the sales conversation takes over.
And should a prospect respond directly to your marketing, the sales conversation is significantly easier as often they’ve already made the decision to buy. They just want to make sure you don’t have two heads!
We’ve proved this time and time again with our clients as well as ourselves.
Prospects who’ve consumed a lot of our material, sitting down with us have it printed out, highlighted with sticky notes, tell us they’ve already decided to buy before the meeting.
Wrapping up, remember, in business nothing happens until someone sells something.
No matter how great you are at delivery, unless you can get your message into the hands of people who are in a position to buy, and then close the deal, your business will die.
If your business isn’t growing at the rate you’d like, our MPS program will help you bring in a steady stream of clients.
Contact Rashid on 0414 913 334 and we’ll spend an hour mapping out a bespoke plan for you. It’s on us and there’s no obligation to do anything further with us.
