A Process Approach to Effectively Managing Sales & Marketing

After a long struggle, I now have real ‘cut-through’ in my sales and marketing processes. I’ll tell you the secret…[ Note I wrote this 18 months ago, but only just found it again]

When I looked at marketing texts, they tell me that marketing is about product, price, placement and promotion. Unfortunately, this hasn’t ever helped me because I can’t seem to connect the dots in a useful way between what services I am selling and concepts such as placement.  When I worked in advertising, we always talked about getting “cut through”, which was kind of useful but always only part of the picture. As a process person, what I have always been searching for is a simple, all-inclusive framework inside which I could manage my sales and marketing activities.

I know I am not alone in this, as almost every CEO of a small to medium technology company I have ever met seems to want the same thing.

Finally I figured it out, and it turns out I needed nothing more complex than a spreadsheet to be in full control of my operations. It’s worthwhile noting here though, that this article is about managing tactical level sales and marketing, not the strategic level questions such as “Who am I selling to, what are they buying, why are they buying it and where to next?”.

First, you have to appreciate that all sales and marketing boils down to a number of standard processes, and if you are not engaging in those processes, you have to ask “what the hell am I doing this for?”   The six standard processes are:

1. Generating Leads – How do I find leads, or how do they find out about me.
2. Qualifying Prospects – How do I find out if these leads need my products or services, or how do they find if they need me?
3. Customer Conversion – How do I turn prospects into customers.
4. Service Delivery – How do I deliver my products or services to generate happy customers?
5. Re-offering – How do I re-offer my services to happy customers?
6. Analysis – How do I review what I am doing and make changes where appropriate?

This is the framework that I am working within and each sales and marketing activity fits into one of those processes.  To create a worksheet to then manage my sales and marketing, I create a spreadsheet with each of those processes as a column heading.

I then enter each of my activities as a row heading. Normally I split them into (now this is just me) marketing activities, being one to many programs, and sales activities, being one to one programs.

The advantage of this is that on one sheet, in simple form I can now tell what I am up to, and where the holes are.

In my case:
Press releases – An occasional press release allows more people to find out about the Churchill Club.
Website – My website attracts people, lets them find out more about our programs and register for events.
Bi-monthly email – The email doesn’t help new people find out about the Churchill Club but it is the main way I let prospects and existing customers know about what is coming up.
CRM system – Manages all my customer and prospect information so I can analyse what has happened.
Networking – Everywhere I go, I meet people and tell them about the Churchill Club.
Generating notes – As a differentiator, I generate notes for every Churchill Club event, so that attendees have a more rewarding experience.

Mapping how I spend by time (and the Churchill Club’s money) also gives me an immediate fix on where I can make savings and efficiencies.

Remember the framework for managing my sales and marketing that I touched on last week? This framework also lends itself to mapping out what my competitors do.

Although no one else in Melbourne really seems to focus on the same content in the same way as my organisation the Churchill Club, we really compete against anyone else that takes up potential customer time with ideas and networking. So we are competing against a huge list, many of which are free and government-funded.

The final thing about this framework is that it lends itself to generating simple but effective KPIs. Consider what happens when I allocate costs and outcomes to the programs. The following image is a drill-down on my networking activities and assumes (for the sake of simplicity) the Churchill Club paid me $2000 to generate sales.

On Churchill Club duties last month, I spent eight hours meeting new people, four hours persuading people to come to events and sending out emails to new people, eight hours delivering events and another two hours sending out the bi-monthly email to subscribers.

As a result, I met eight new people, generated two prospects, delivered a Churchill Club event to 46 people and offered the event to a total of 900 subscribers.

Calculating it out in Excel, it looks like this.

Clearly I can see from my framework that trying to generate new customers by meeting people is very expensive. Any program I can find that generates leads for under $91 is a winner.

Spending time working on a prospect is also expensive with only two of the original eight I met being likely to turn up to an event (cost $182 each, not including the initial time).

My time spent delivering the programs was way too expensive for a $33–$44 event. If we were a for-profit we would be going backwards at a great rate of knots.

Finally, it’s clear that sending out emails isn’t actually free at all. When you include my time it’s actually costing about 20¢ per email.  Actually now that I’ve written the above, I quite depressed.  On the bright side, I now have some hard figures to work with to fix the Churchill Club.

So, I am sure that plenty of people will hate my system and point out the flaws, but It’s mine, and I think its kind of cool, In a process-focused technology kind of way.

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