Podcast Episode

Transcript:  

Hello and welcome to the sales Show. I'm Maree Kirkpatrick, your sales and business strategist. I'm a mum, a wife, and a multi-business owner myself. With over 15 years experience in sales and business, I have worked with startups all the way through to multimillion dollar. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I love helping service-based businesses make an income as well as an impact. Let's jump into talking about all things sales and business.

Welcome to today's episode of the Sales Show. I'm so excited you're here today. We are talking sales verse marketing. We are going to put them in the ring and figure out which one we need to be focusing on more or less, or which one's more important depending on the stage of business that we are in and where we are currently up to now.

The reason why I want to look at these two things is because I see a lot of businesses that focus heavily on marketing, and sometimes I feel like it doesn't need to be the focus of the business at that point in time. Then there are other companies that I see that are so focused on sales that they don't always look at future proofing their business from a marketing point of view and really getting a lot more leads and inquiries coming through their business.

Although, yes, I'm obviously very sales focused because that's my specialty, but I do also help my clients with marketing and looking at ways of generating more leads coming into their business. I want to focus on this today and talk about both sides of the coin because I think that it can really determine the profitability in your business as well as the long-term success of your business. If we look at it from from a marketing point of view, the job of marketing is to attract more leads or inquiries into the business. Really get that interest happening about your products, your services, your company, your brand. 

But then from a sales perspective, the job of sales is to actually convert those leads and inquiries that come. The great thing is that both sales and marketing have the same goal. They both want to generate more cash, more sales, more profitability into the business. However, a lot of businesses don't look at them as two pieces of the puzzle.

They look at them as quite separate activities or even departments. I know when I've worked in corporate, there have been sales teams and there have been marketing. It's about getting those two to talk to each other so that the company overall and the business achieves those goals that we are looking at.

Now, when I've worked with companies in the past, where are a lot of people will focus on marketing. One of my amazing clients, she's been in business for over eight years, and when she first came on board with me tole me "I need some help from a sales point of view, we are making sales, but I think we can do it a lot more efficiently." 

She was looking at marketing from a Google Ads and SEO point of view. She looked at it and thought this is just a numbers game. If I throw X amount of dollars at Google, or if I do this level of seo, then it equals a certain number or a certain figure per month of sales coming into the business.

However, when we started talking, I said to her, maybe we don't need to be spending that much money or that much time and energy to get that level of sales. She said "what does that mean? What does that look like?" What about if we focused purely on sales, the efficiency of our sales, the conversion of our sales, the life cycle of our sales and inquiries are coming through, and maybe we can turn down our marketing a little bit to save us the money, but increase our sales.

Now, if I said to you, you could make more money doing less marketing and throwing less money at Google ads or Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads or spending money on your SEO, marketing ect. You could increase your sales, I'm pretty sure you'd be like, hell yeah, Maree, sign me up. This is want to look at today.

How do we actually do that? What does that look like? What I did with this particular client is we looked at her current sales process and yes, she had a sales process through her business that she had just mapped together over the years. When we looked at it, there were ways that we could really tweak, optimise, and just make that customer journey path a lot more.

Nurturing and relationship building, which then would equal more sales. So that's what we did. We worked together for about 12 months, completely pulling apart her sales process, her customer journey path within her business and rebuilding. What was working, what was not working? What are we tracking? What are we not tracking? What are our numbers showing? What are our metrics showing? Some businesses don't even have that data available, and that's okay if if you are happy with where your business is at. However, there's a lot of, there's not many companies that I have worked with spoken to or heard about that aren't interested in growing their business. There's some yes. A lot of the time, businesses want to grow, increase their sales, increase their profitability. If you can look at what your sales processes are currently doing, then we can look at what we can optimize and refine, add things in, take things out, just depending on exactly what's happening. When it comes to that sales and marketing dance, I look at it is a dance. We want to make sure that we do have leads coming in, but we also want make sure that we are converting the leads that are coming in.

Every lead that we are bringing in, we are nurturing, we are looking after them to the best of our ability because that client can purchase once. Or it can be a lifelong client. I still work with some of the first clients I ever had in my consulting firm, and I still to this day am absolutely blown away by it because we continuously keep increasing their business, increasing their profitability, tweaking what they're doing and really refining it so that their business is working like a very well oiled machine. When it comes to that dance, I want to make sure that every single lead that comes into your business has the highest chance of becoming a. client.  I'm going to say that again so that it really sinks in. I want to make sure that every single lead that comes into your business has the highest chance of becoming a client.

Now, if I just focus on marketing and I keep spending thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even if it's a $100, $200, $300, on ads. I want to make sure that I'm getting a great return on investment. So if you have a sales process, a sales strategy already within your business, great. If you are tracking it, if you are making sure that it is constantly you are refining it, tweaking it, optimizing it, fantastic. I take my hat off to you, keep doing what you're doing. Then you can turn on the marketing tap because I know that whatever leads come in, if I give you a hundred leads, I already know what your conversion rate will be because you have a beautiful sales system and process already put into your business.

However, if you do not have that sales process within your business, that is developed, it is implemented, it is optimised, it is efficient. You can tell me what your conversion rates are. You can  tell me what your average sales orders are, all that data, then I don't feel like it is the best option to turn your marketing tap on straightaway or full blast.

Make sure that you have the sales process to support your marketing activities so that each lead that comes in, we know that we have a high chance of converting them, helping them, nurturing, creating that relationship so that they then become a pain client. When I first started in business, I worked with a mentor and all she kept saying to me was, Maree, you need to build your list to grow your business. You need to build your list. You need to build your list. You're not gonna get anywhere unless you build your list. Oh, fine. I'll build my list. I'll build my list. I kept saying that I was gonna build my list and then I didn't actually do it, so don't tell anyone. For me it was like, building my list is great to a certain degree, but I wanna make sure that I'm also generating the sales.

If I don't have my sales process put in place, implemented, trackable, measurable, repeatable, scalable, there's no point in me having a list because the people that I get onto my list, if I can't sell them, there's no point in them being there. If you are new in business, I would say focus on sales first.

Start putting together that sales process. Understand your sales strategy, how you want to sell, what you want to sell, what do those steps look like, and then turn on your marketing tap. If you've been in business for a little while, you have clients coming in, you know that your product sells and that clients get results and things like that then make sure that your sales process is optimised. Make sure that it is working efficiently, that you have high conversion rates and things like that. And then go for it. Turn on the marketing tap. And then it can be a numbers game. But I get my clients to a point where if I give you a hundred leads, I can safely and confidently know that you can manage them, that you will convert them.

These days, if I said, yep, cool, I will give you a hundred fresh, high quality leads. Can you manage them? Can you close them? Can you convert them? Can you service them? Can you onboard them without dropping any balls or anything like that? Some people will have a little mini heart attack. They will be under the bed going this is a great problem to have, but I'm struggling. If you struggle and turn on a marketing tap too soon and end up with a whole heap of leads that you cannot convert, you cannot manage, you cannot look after. It damages your company. People will get bad service, they'll have bad experiences. They're not well looked after, and then it's really hard to come back from. It's a really bad way. It can really damage your marketing.

So if I put them in the ring I still believe that sales will come out on top because I feel like, there's no revenue without sales. There can be revenue without marketing. Some people will say  I've developed my business, my consulting firm, purely by referrals. I haven't done a lot of marketing. I haven't, as I said before, just between you and me, I haven't really been focusing on building that list because at the start, my goal was sales and to generate enough money to support myself and the business overall so that we could grow.

But if I just focused on marketing and I spent a whole heap of time, spending money on Google ads or Facebook ads, and if I didn't have that sales process, then potentially, I have holes in my bucket, in my business bucket. Make sure all of that is plugged up and that your sales process is ready to handle your marketing activities and things that you're putting out there.

If we are choosing a winner, it will always be sales for me, because without sales, there's no revenue. But then again, I am the salesperson.

Let me know what you think. Drop me a line at [email protected].

I am absolutely looking forward to sharing more about sales and business throughout this podcast journey and on the sales show. If you've got any questions or you'd love to reach out, please contact me, [email protected]. 

Please share it on social media for your friends to see and make sure you tag me @MareeKirkpatrick so I can personally say thank you. If you would like to show me some love, leave me a review on Apple Podcast.

If you would like to work with me further or see any of the free resources mentioned on today's show, they can be found at www.mareekirkpatrick.com. I truly hope this podcast provides useful information and so much value to you so that you can build a business with impact and income.