Marketing, sales, and business — the three-headed monster. Pt. 1

As a tech founder, it is quite easy to push marketing and growth to side, while focusing on building your product instead. In fact, just from conversations I had with many of my colleagues, I took a notice that marketing is treated as ‘mysterious’ topic which we want nothing to do with. However, last summer I put myself in a freelancing position where I worked on a rebranding and tech solutions for a local company in Tel-Aviv . Now when it came to my own business, I was guilty of pushing these topics to the side as well, and got to building the product after a brief market research instead. I guess the reasoning behind this, could be that as tech-oriented people, we tend to prefer science over humanities, and it’s quite hard to see the science and the numbers behind marketing; this where I was all wrong. Shall we go and find out?

So how do you explain marketing?

The easiest way for me to explain marketing, is to project it as a strategic multi-step process with many different methodologies. Much like the ‘Agile’, ‘Scrum’, and ‘Lean’ methodologies from the product-development world, we employ different strategies to achieve different milestones. A very close strategy and discipline to the tech world is “growth hacking”, which I will talk about in details later on.

Can’t I just outsource it?

Whether you choose to go with traditional marketing techniques, or, come up with clever growth hacks, it it important to understand that marketing strategy is an iterative and fluid aspect of your brand and product, as it requires constant attention and has to be optimized very often.

Do not treat marketing as a ‘black box’, and attempt to outsource it immediately. Instead, take it to be a CRUCIAL part of your product-development. After all, your marketing process will determine your brand’s and products’ growth rate.

What is the main process behind marketing?

If I had to summarize the general process of marketing, it would consist of the following:

1. Understand your market
2. Adapting your product.
3. Generating interest in your product, and communicating its benefits.
4. Prompting action for others to buy your product.

Do you see how 3 out of 4 steps here explicitly focus on the product? In fact, the first step is implicitly all about the product as well, since it starts with the issue at hand and offers the product as a solution.

What do you mean by ‘growth’?

Growth in the context of business is usually referring to the process of incrementing your audience size, where the audience represents a crowd of customers and followers. I will touch on growth in future along with “growth hacking”.

Now what about ‘sales’?

Ok, so you got a couple of calls, people are interested in your product, you have potential customers who are willing to pay, now what?

It is time to close those deals, and grow your client base. This is exactly where the ‘Sales’ person has to come out of you and your co-founders.

Now what exactly is Sales? it is the process of ‘communicating deals to the market and acquiring customers’. Just like the rest of the processes, we should focus on building a methodology, one which will work in harmony with our marketing strategy and lead to the growth of our client base.

To get familiar with this space, you should start by picking up a sales framework and focus on building your initial sales strategy.

Use sales strategies of others for inspiration rather than as a exact model for success, as you do so, you should align each tactic (or hack) in your sales strategy with your marketing process to fit YOUR product.

On the other hand, I think that sales frameworks are a great way to get started on building your methodology, simply take them and adjust them to your marketing campaigns, needs and products.

Keep in mind that there are different variables you would have have to adjust to in your product and market which you will learn about with time, but before we dive deeper, I want to talk about growth and how it relates to sales.

You mention ‘growth’ a lot, why?

Well, isn’t it every founder’s priority? After all, we established that Marketing and Sales are here to promote your business’s growth. Yes, having an MVP, or an early product is great. Staying in touch with potential investors and constantly pitching your business is awesome. However, growth strategy is absolutely necessary to keep your business afloat. It is important to remember, that scaling isn’t only about tech and distribution, but also about customer acquisition (through effective sales strategy) and brand recognition (part of your marketing strategy).

[B2B / High-value deals] Sales Calls 2.0

One great B2B sales strategy is ‘Sales Call 2.0’ where your build a process in order to predict and scale call-based or high-value sales. This process will require you to rethink the calls, focus on what the customer needs, and divide your sales department into a better structure, where each division focuses on different aspect of the sales process.

The process goes as such:

1. Look for a customer (LinkedIn, conferences, emails, quality leads lists)
2. Drop a short mysterious message that will convince your customer to talk just about anything
3. Work on getting referrals until you reach the right person in the business you are looking to sell to
4. Develop a relationship with the right individual, and treat as such, and let them talk about their problem
5. Once identified adapt your solution to your customers need
6. Pass the deal from one division to another until the sale is closed.
7. Take important metrics while you do so, and improve consistency of process
8. Repeat with the next customer. Steps 6,7 are crucial to the process as they will allow you to scale your sales, predict your costs of sales, and finally predict your revenue

I can’t stress this enough but you have to keep your messages short and create impacting calls by letting the customer ‘do the talk’, instead of trying to shove a product down their throat.

Collect valuable feedback while you do so to improve the rest of your product or services. Concentrate on the impact of the calls, the information gathered, and the relationships built, rather than the number of calls made!

You can tweak this process and apply most of the steps to high-value B2C sales as well, use this wisely.

To understand B2B sales and sales structures better, I’d recommend you to read “Predictable Revenue”

[B2C Mass volume] Quality > Quantity

I won’t touch on B2C sales tactics just yet, as there are many of them all over the web. If ‘Sales Call 2.0’ doesn’t work for you, look at other frameworks, just take into account, that the B2C market have a much shorter decision-making period, this can work both for you and against you.

Some of the most common methodologies people use for B2C are ‘Always Close’ (aggressive product pushing) and ‘Short Supply, High Demand’ (exclusivity driven by hype).

Although these frameworks have boosted the sales of many successful brands. In my opinion, these bad frameworks to start with, when taking in account how oversaturation rules most of the markets.

Why? It doesn’t promote growth. How do you promote growth? Get people to talk about you / your products and allow them to introduce to the people close to them. (Don’t drag your closed beta too long or the buzz will die)
How do you get people to talk about you? Deliver them a product they love, which they won’t be able to live without after using it once.

I truly believe that it is better to focus on giving your customers high value when starting, and creating a caring customer service in order to generate a loyal crowd and initiate a word-of-mouth campaign around your product.

Check this reddit-based sales tactic, this is very valuable for startups focusing on B2C and other businesses.

Closing Words

While I currently work as a Blockchain Engineer @ Avenews-GT, I kept dabbling in marketing and growth ever since my last rebranding project. I decided to write a series of articles about these topics and present some examples and strategies in a form of study cases. My next post will be about business, and will connect the dots between marketing and sales so stay tuned! Any type of feedback is always welcome, hope you had fun reading this! ❤️