Keep your marketing and sales on track (Part 1)

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on how companies can focus their sales and marketing efforts. The next installment explains how to best match marketing tools to specific market segments.

© Cammerayday | Dreamstime.comWinning work and keeping customers loyal for life are goals that most industry firms pursue. Today it is the difference between maintaining a backlog and needing to lay off good people. The challenge is that there are plenty of other firms in the market competing alongside you. What you need to be successful is a

Winning Advantage
Customers award work to firms that have a winning project approach and sensible price. You can certainly compete on a basis of price. You also can find strategies to add value and create a winning project approach. If you can combine both a winning approach and a sensible price, you will capture the customer’s attention.

The key to building value is to position your firm before the project opportunity hits the streets. That is when the customer is most open to exploring how your organization is different and connecting the value you bring to future project(s).

In this article, we explore what it takes to move a customer from not knowing who you are to convincing them you are the right company for the project. We will show you how to move them systematically down the “track” toward choosing your firm and explore tools and strategies for educating customers.

Marketing and Selling Process
Marketing and sales are terms that are used interchangeably in the industry. Yet, the difference can mean closing a large number of projects or being the runner-up more times than you care to count.

Marketing, by definition, is everything a company does as seen by your customers or perspective customers. The industry tends to think of marketing solely as brochures, web pages, public relations, customer events and so on.

However, marketing also includes job signs, how your trucks look rolling down the highway, the accuracy of your invoices, the way customers are greeted over the phone and even housekeeping on projects. Marketing has two primary jobs. The first is to lead a customer to purchase for reasons besides price. The second is to keep in touch with your existing customers – the lifeblood of your company.

Sales have a very different focus. Sales are a psychological transaction that involves more than price. It involves targeting the right customer and projects, creating a winning strategy and booking the project as backlog. Sales are more short-term focused than marketing. They concentrate on winning work and building a consistent level of backlog. Sales are a natural extension of an effective marketing approach.

As marketing and sales work together, customers and prospective customers come to understand the value you bring to a project aside from your price. With a solid marketing and sales foundation, customers will take the time to find out more about your approach and give you a legitimate shot at winning the work. To be most effective, marketing and sales need to position the same overall message to the same customers.

In their simplest sense, marketing and sales encompass the process of moving your potential customers along a railroad track of awareness. Prospective customers hop on the train completely unaware of your company and what you do. Customers get off the train fully convinced of the value you bring to the project. Some customers will even become preferred or key customers. Preferred customers are looking for more than the lowest possible price. They are looking for services and support that help their business succeed. After all, that is the reason they are building a construction project; they want to grow, expand and/or improve their business.

Imagine using different tools and techniques to get your customers farther down a railroad track. Each marketing and sales tool has a different objective, and each moves clients and prospective clients farther down the track. Matching the right tool to the right position on the railroad track helps you get the customer on board and ready to do business with you. The further down the tracks you go, the closer you become to reaching your final goal, such as scoring a customer for life.

Think of the marketing and selling processes as the parallel lines of a railroad track.

The tracks also encompass your market. If you are an international player, then the tracks include the world and all of the existing and potential customers, regardless of where they are in the world. If you focus on Hillsborough County, Fla., then the box includes everybody who is an existing or potential customer within Hillsborough County, Fla. 

Moving Down the Tracks
The railroad tracks are the framework in which to envision the marketing and selling processes taking place. Remember, marketing is everything as seen through the eyes of customers and prospective customers. If the customer sees it, it is marketing – intended or not. If the customer does not see it, then it has no value regardless of the cost. Marketing is about creating perceptions in the minds of customers and prospective customers.

If chosen correctly, marketing tools will effectively communicate your message to the customer in an appropriate method at the appropriate time. Marketing is a two-way street – it is about your outbound communications with the marketplace and the resulting revenue you earn. It is about creating and delivering value to your customer and receiving value in return.

Figure 1 below shows the railroad tracks closed in on the ends and with five equal sections of the track. On the left-hand side are customers who are unaware of your company; on the right are preferred customers. Notice the heading to the left of the track: marketing tools.

Let us look at the individual segments of the track. The first is segment is “unaware.” It includes potential customers who do not know you exist. You might not know they exist at this stage either.

The second segment is “aware.” The customer knows you exist and you know they exist. Nevertheless, it is not likely that any sales will take place in either of these first two segments because the customers are still in evaluation mode at best.

The third segment of the track is “informed.” These customers are familiar with your business; they know you are a certain type of contractor, they know your location and they may know some people within your organization. In turn, you know some of their people and something about their business.

The fourth track segment is “convinced.” If customers in this category have a need for the services that you provide, you will be considered as a primary candidate for the project. It is at this point that your salespeople need to establish a close relationship with these customers and their people.

“Convinced” is the ideal place to contact customers because they are starting to think about the project in concrete terms. With the beginning of beneficial discovery and evaluation of your capabilities, the customer will determine if the two of you should do business together.

One of the primary reasons the selling process is so important is you are interacting person-to-person; you are putting a face to a relationship that began after the customer moved from “unaware” to “aware,” to “informed” and now to “convinced.”

The last segment of track holds “preferred” customers. You are their preferred provider of services. In fact, they are so convinced of your value that they will not even ask for a comparison bid. They just call you and ask you to do the work, or they tell you they have a need and you respond. That is what they expect you to do. It is a mutually beneficial relationship because you are providing value and meeting their unique needs. You are so knowledgeable about their business that they get a better product when you are engaged on the project.

FMI’s Market Research Group has found that the “informed” customers will most likely do business with those companies that have an understanding of the way they as customers operate. Intimate knowledge of the customer’s business gives you an advantage over someone who has not been as diligent in developing the relationship. The key is to systematically build the group of “preferred” customers by digging in and finding their unique hot buttons and then consistently delivering at a level that exceeds their expectations. The ultimate goal of any marketing or selling effort is finding the customers that value what you do to such a degree that they become loyal.

Cynthia Paul is a managing director at FMI Corporation. She may be reached at cpaul@fminet.com. Hoyt Lowder is a retired senior vice president with FMI. He may be reached at hlowder@fminet.com.