Marketing done well, almost do not need sales!

There is still a lot of confusion around selling benefits and features as oppose to considering the customer experience and journey; especially for the small business owner. This is causing a huge amount of time, effort and money spent on marketing which could easily be used to rather focus on delivering excellent service, upsells, repeat sales and referrals.

Marketing Gone Wrong Example

To illustrate this let’s look at the business ‘Sharping Knives’ as an example. The business owner of Sharping Knives, focus is on providing sharp knives that will cut easily. This is done quickly and at the convenience of your home – short and sweet! And to Sharping Knives business owner he now should attract a lot of leads from his social media posts and website. But nothing is happening! Nobody likes, shares or comments and his website remains an unknown Internet expense! This is known as selling benefits and features!

However, the potential customer of Sharping Knives has a totally different view. Suffering from severe Arthritis cutting with a blunt knife is becoming extremely difficult for arthritis sufferers. A sharp knife should be an obvious sale but with all the online noise and clutter the message is buried to the arthritis sufferer. But should the headline read “Cutting Solutions for the Arthritis Sufferer” suddenly the message will stand out. Why? Because the potential customer of Sharping Knives can relate, and the message will be seen and heard. Now the potential customer clicks on a link showing interest and the business owner can start educating and informing this ‘lead’ of what is all the advantages while building the relationship for the lead to convert into a ‘prospect’. The business owner can now comfortably ask for contact details and enter the sale. This is known as relationship marketing and selling!

This is ridiculous who has time for that!

I agree. For the small business owner to go through all this seems like a real waste of valuable time. Unfortunately, the reverse is more real and truer. Mass social media marketing is at the order of the day and the small business owner spend hours trying to find a sale everyday neglecting his business and ultimately the customer experience. At the end profits are an afterthought as the methods of operation employed are only for survival purposes.

What the small business owner needs is a consistent influx of qualified prospects into his business. But this is where the confusion really kicks in big time as a prospect is often confused as a lead. A lead is an unqualified contact and could very well be someone that showed some interest but not necessarily will be buying anything.

Therefore, any potential customer you meet that hasn’t been qualified as a prospect, is a lead. In the sales process, you gather leads first, qualify them into prospects, and then move them through a sales preparation or relationship building process. 

The Birth of the LEAD GENERATOR

The ultimate Utopia or is it real? It is real! After years in my own businesses as well as providing a lead generation service to my clients I became familiar with the frustration of marketing wasting time, effort and money by yielding poor or no results. Even worse is marketing done with no metrics to provide insights as to what works and why. Because poor marketing results are also ‘good’ as it brings the business closer to finding the perfect marketing solutions if the metrics are available.

The LEAD GENERATOR is the ultimate. I designed and developed the LEAD GENERATOR and it can be used by any business of any size in any industry. I build a lead nurturing structure using and integrating different systems and marketing components to add measurable intelligence to the prospecting phase, which is sourcing leads from mainly Facebook and/or LinkedIn. These leads are then added to a sales funnel to educate and inform them on the solutions available aiming at creating inbound prospects for the business. Only once this has been achieved the prospect will be handed over to the business’s sales function to close the deal.

The LEAD GENERATOR is the ultimate solution for the small business to generate ready to buy prospects and focus on building a profitable and successful business.

I have three options available:

1. A Build and Design only option. For businesses with their own marketing department that will do their own prospecting.
2. A Done for you option. For businesses that wish to outsource their marketing completely.
3. A Bespoke Solution whereby the LEAD GENERATOR will be designed and developed specific to the business requirements.

As a certified Content, Email and Social marketer, the main components for online funnel marketing success, the creation of the LEAD GENERATOR with its subsequent successes are extremely rewarding to me in my marketing career.  

For more information email me: tilly@tillydavies.co.za