Why Your Marketing & Sales Tactics Stopped Working

by
Steve August
July 13, 2020
Customer Creation Flywheel
,

This week I've had several conversations with Founders who were really frustrated about their marketing and sales results.

Now obviously, there's been a lot of impact from the COVID-19 crisis, but as crises often do, the COVID-19 crisis has really just exposed issues with their revenue generation efforts that were there all along.

It's not like they aren't putting in the attention and effort. They just aren't getting the return they wanted.

One Founder was really frustrated with his marketing and sales team. He felt that they were too caught up in finding the right marketing automation tools and not reaching right out to customers.

Another had done a tremendous amount of work to become a thought leader in his field, and has a track record of success. He's put a lot of money and effort into a brand overhaul, but his new offerings aren't taking off like he'd hoped.

And a third felt like there was just a sense of randomness to his wins. He said he felt like each day he would guide his boat out into the lake and hope the place he dropped his line in the right pool to land his next clients. But it's sometimes a long time between wins.

All of them share the same uneasy feeling:  they don't feel like they have a reliable way to scale sales.

I know exactly how they feel. When I was running my first startup, I totally felt like I was operating on faith and hope when I wanted to have a reliable pipeline. It was really draining and scary.

But here's the big lesson that I've learned both running B2B and B2C businesses. Sales and marketing should be Ruthlessly Simple:

1. A specific kind of person has a huge pain that they need to fix.
2. You offer something that fixes their pain.
3. You find those people suffering the pain and show them how you fix it.
4. They buy your offering.
5. Repeat.

That's it. Crazy right? Can it be that simple? Yes. Yes it can. In fact, it has to be.

What happens is that people don't nail steps 1-4 before trying to scale step 5. All the automation tools, scripts, nurture sequences, ad campaigns, cold outreach, etc are Step 5 tools. They will magnify whatever you have created in Steps 1-4.

If steps 1-4 aren't crystal clear, if there's fuzziness there's going to be problems.

If you haven't boiled down your proposition to a specific enough audience, if you haven't figured out what problem you a really solving for them, if you aren't clear on the business you are really in (usually it's not the thing you make/do), then you are going not be able to reliably scale sales.

Get Steps 1-4 right and everything falls into place.

If you are sitting there asking yourself if you have these Steps 1-4 right, then most likely you don't.

When you nail them you know it, because you are going to have a hard time keeping up with the business you create.

Until next week,

Steve

SteveAugustCoaching
Helping Founders Build Rocket Ships

PS  If this post resonated with you, and you are looking to reliably scale sales for your business, let's talk. I think I can help. Book a free clarity call here.

Recent Posts

Recent posts

Founder Type Quiz Results

by
Steve August
March 4, 2022
,

LET’S LIGHT THIS CANDLE