Darrick: Hey, everyone, it’s Darrick and Walt here with Coach’s Corner part of Denver Business Coach. We’re both coaches and strategists with Denver Business Coach. We decided to bring our show online because we get a lot of questions from clients and other small business owners and entrepreneurs about their business and challenges they’re having, and we wanted to give everyone a taste of what it’s like to work one on one with a coach, and how we help businesses kind of take their operations and their sales and their marketing and everything to the next level.
Darrick: So today we have a question from a technology services company in Parker, and the question is, “Our sales have slowed, and we’ve never spent a lot on marketing, so we’re not sure how to develop a smart plan to increase our sales. Can you help?”
Walter: Everything starts with sales, doesn’t it?
Darrick: Really does, it really does. It all comes back to sales.
Walter: They’ve been fortunate to be successful without a real detailed sales and marketing plan. That says a lot about the company to begin with and the owners. But in this case, when it comes to determining what the smart marketing plan and sales plan is, like any engagement with our clients, we first try to really listen and understand what their marketplace is, what their unique sales proposition is, what makes them the best in their market, or what makes them unique.
Walter: And then we look at the tools they’re using to develop a plan to increase sales, where their leads are coming from, client profiles, and just types of things that can help us pinpoint a strategy to help them increase sales, to increase market awareness. And there are lots of different tools to use to achieve those objectives. So that’s kind of the right start right Darrick? What do you see?
Darrick: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the first things I talk with clients about, is some people have this misconception that sales and marketing are the same things. And I really try to help them separate the two and say, marketing feeds that sales beast. It’s always hungry and it needs feeding. But sales is very much a process-driven thing, where you have a sales funnel, you’ve got to figure out how to get as many leads into that funnel as you can, because it’s going to narrow down quickly and you’re only going to get a certain amount out of the bottom.
Darrick: So how you put that process together and how rigorous you are about how to qualify those leads and how to fill that funnel, is really critical. And that’s something that we work with clients on a lot, is making sure that that is a process that you spend a lot of time on.
Darrick: Because thinking that you can put out a couple of messages on social media or buy some ads on the radio or television and that customers are just going to come to you, it just doesn’t happen that way. There’s too much competition. There’s too much, there are too many options out there for consumers. So you need to spend the time on that.
Darrick: And then the marketing piece, understanding who you are, like who your brand is. If you were to make an avatar of your ideal customer, who is that person? What do they look like? What are they going to buy? How how do they behave? And then you can start to craft your messaging around that. So it always stays consistent, but it really is a process to go through. And that’s kind of what we spend time on, is making sure that you spend enough time on that, both of those processes to make them really effective.
Walter: Yeah, you hit on a couple of key points that I make sure we talk about with any of the clients that I work with. First of all, marketing usually is broken down into a mixture of tools out there, designed to either increase awareness of you and your solution or generate direct results. And you want to be consistent in your messaging, regardless of the toolset that you are using.
Walter: And that’s another key point you made. And then from there, how to measure the effectiveness of your messaging. And we help them with lead generation analysis, what’s their conversion ratio. Another area we delve into is what makes the most sense in your market with your solution set. Is it trying to increase your sales by existing customers selling them more of the products that you have? Or is it finding new customers for the products that you ar best with? Maybe it’s a blend of those two.
Walter: Another option that we look at is, is your offering doesn’t lend itself to recurring revenue models, subscription services, and things like that. All of these go into a comprehensive analysis, really, of a sales and marketing plan. And again, the fact that we tailor it to your business and your marketplace is what I think makes Denver Business Coach different. And those are the kinds of things that I try to use. Darrick, any other things you can see?
Darrick: I think for some people, and on one of our other sessions we talked about how as a small business owner, you don’t have to be a financial analyst to keep good track of your numbers. It’s the same with sales and marketing. You don’t have to become an expert in marketing and sales. If you decide that this is just too much for me or not what I want, that’s another thing I think we bring to the table that I really enjoy, is that we’ve got a great stable of professionals that we work with on a regular basis, that this is what they do for a living.
Darrick: They look at small businesses and they help them get their message out there and they help them figure out how to do this. And so if you decide, “Hey, yes, I could do it and I don’t have time or no, I’m just not interested in marketing at all”. Let’s bring in a professional. They can help you with developing a plan to increase sales. And typically we find that it’s a very affordable option and you get fantastic results from it.
Walter: Yeah, I think that pretty well sums up. The key is we will first listen to you and learn about your business and market, help you find what may be the low hanging fruit is, to start to initiate some immediate results, and then work with you long term to optimize your entire sales and marketing efforts moving forward.
Walter: So if this is the kind of approach that you would find valuable, in helping find guidance in certain areas of your business, please call or email us or find us at DenverBusinessCoach.com. And if you have a question that you’d like to present to us to have for a future discussion. Please let us know.
Darrick: Thanks for joining us. Take care.