When we’re asked what it takes to end up with a marketing and sales funnel full of the right kind of activities, which deliver results, we say, ‘There are three phases to achieve that and they are: Design, Build, Run.’
Phase 1. Design – pulling together your strategic marketing thinking and then methodically drawing out what happens at each step of your marketing and sales pipeline.
Phase 2. Build that funnel. Take your diagram and make it real, building it with the right marketing and sales management tech.
Phase 3. Run it – hit ‘on’ and run all your marketing and sales activities through it, learning, tweaking and improving so you deliver results.
But many businesses aren’t yet ready to start on Phase 1. They need to do some preparation before they can begin ‘Design’. It’s like the prep before you embark on any big Project; the preparation you do before can really help make your Project a success.
The three key ways to prepare for designing your marketing and sales pipeline:
Choose your segments
When you build your marketing and sales funnel, you will build it to attract, communicate with, convert to a client and retain the right kind of clients for your business. Every group of people has their own preferred way to engage with your business, their own communication needs, and their own timescales. You have to know who your segments are before you can start to design your marketing and sales funnel.
If you try to market and sell to ‘everybody’, you will design something that doesn’t really appeal to anyone.
Real example: We recently worked with a financial services business who said their products were for ‘all professional firms working in the City’s Financial Sector’. When they followed our structure and came up with segments they realised that by keeping it so broad, they had a potential 10 segments to market to. Fine if you have a Marketing Dept – they don’t. They have a team of 1.
So, we helped them hone it down based on who they really wanted to work with and who was most profitable. They reached a much more manageable three segments – and could begin designing their marketing and sales funnel to find, reach, engage and nurture those three groups (who also had lots of crossovers, so it could be one set of marketing and sales activities for most of the time).
Want help choosing your segments? Then watch this Marketing Insights Video, How to segment your market effectively.
Hone your ‘whys’
Your strategic marketing thinking needs to include two key whys in it: why your business exists and why they should choose you.
“Why we exist” is expressed as your mission. It is the driving force behind your whole business. It is what makes you keep going, sets boundaries and parameters to operate within, and gets people behind you.
“Why they should choose us rather than another option” is your unique marketplace position. In a world full of options, it has to be really clear to your prospective clients why they need to choose you.
Too often though, organisations have woolly, generic whys rather than ones that set you alight.
Real Example: Let’s take The Marketing Spaces. We used to say our mission was to help small businesses do better marketing. That’s true. But it’s not actually our reason for being. It’s a result of what we do.
What we are actually here for is to stop small businesses failing because of chaotic, confused, ineffective marketing. We’re here to help them succeed.
But why choose us? What sets us apart from other options? We’re different because we give you the knowledge to figure out what marketing to do, when and why and this knowledge is power. It gives you the power to review, structure and plan your marketing so it delivers results. We don’t tell you what marketing activities to do. We don’t do it for you. We empower you so you know what to do.
When you know ‘why’ your organisation exists and ‘why’ people should choose you, then you can design a marketing and sales funnel full of marketing and sales activities that means you’ll achieve your why.
For more on how to get your mission right, read this Marketing Insights Article.
Adopt a Strategic Marketer mindset
Designing a marketing and sales funnel requires a certain mindset. It’s the mindset that goes against so much of what you probably read and see when it comes to marketing and sales. It’s the mindset needed to design something that is going to deliver sustainable, steady growth.
This means you might see a dip in income while you design and build it.
This means you might see ‘nothing’ happen for the first few weeks or months as you research, design, test, design, build, test, tweak the design again.
This means your time is mostly occupied by the research, thinking and designing of your marketing and sales – rather than ‘doing’ it.
This means that, by so many success criteria such as leads, money in, you are judged to be failing.
And on a practical note, it means your business needs to have the cash available to sustain the business over this phase as it is very hard to run a restaurant with paying customers while you are still designing and building the restaurant…
Getting mentally and practically ready for the Design Phase is important.
For example, before a business starts our 5-week Marketing Pipeline Programme, which is all about Designing your marketing and sales pipeline, we talk with them about what it will mean for them personally, their work, their business.
We ask if they can set aside at least 10 hours for each of the five weeks of the programme.
We ask what they can do to get ready for that time commitment; what they can set up to run while they are occupied.
Whom they need to convince in their business that ‘marketing as usual’ has to be reduced for a while.
How they are going to feel about ‘thinking and designing’ a structured marketing and sales approach, rather than the heady, adrenaline fuelled, ‘doing’ marketing. We help them get mindset ready.
And throughout the 5-week programme we check in at all of our touchpoints (the weekly virtual workshops, their 1-1s and the weekly tea breaks) with how they are feeling.
To help you get mindset ready, watch this Marketing Insights Video ‘Will You Tell Me What Marketing To Do?’ No And Here’s Why and read this Marketing Insights Article: Five lifelong skills you need as a Marketer
If you like having a structure to follow and want do it in your own time, then you’ll find our online course, ‘How to write a strategic marketing plan’ the perfect solution.
Our CEO and Founder, Kara Stanford, takes you step by step through your strategic marketing thinking, showing you how to capture all those thoughts in a logical, structured manner.
By the end of it you are much clearer on who your segments are and your ‘whys’ – and have that mindset needed ready to design the marketing and sales pipeline that will work.
