A tale of marketing without thinking.

Marketing activity without strategy is like intrusive surgery without a diagnosis. Strategy without insight is like a diagnosis without asking the patient what the symptoms are.

Picture the situation; your strategy team has identified a discrete European market that consumes your product in a way almost identical to your principal domestic market at a similar price point. Your sales division is investing in feet on the ground in the form of a sales person with dedicated pre and post sales support.

The total addressable market is 1,500 business clients. Prospects that match your target profile in terms of size and ability to influence is about a sixth of this. The customers that are most susceptible to the product to the product you have already had success with in this market is a fifth again. Therefore you have a target prospect list of around 50 clients to sell to over the next 12 to 18 months.

It goes without saying you won’t ignore sales opportunities outside this target list, but they will have to be qualified as winnable in order to justify spending scarce sales resource on them. The point of the target list is focus those limited resources firstly where you are most likely to win and secondly where you can and grow your business profitably over a defined time period.

Metrics and sales targets can be aligned to ensure every part of the business focuses on closing as much business as possible with this target market. The strategy team could even be more precise about those targets by researching average order value compared to the organisations average order value. Even a half decent B2B marketing team can turn a market entry strategy such as this into an effective campaign almost regardless of budget.

All sound, all rationale. So why the blog? Well a friend in a technology services business presented with just this scenario has been instructed by his Marketing Director to plan a €100k campaign featuring above the line for print and radio. Why? The local new sales guy says the brand is unknown and a massive brand awareness campaign is essential before he can do his work.

This approach is so counter to an intelligent led campaign I have been bursting to write about it. In fact I could write a book on why this is wrong, but to hone in on just one issue, it’s leadership.

Sales success comes from identifying your target market, developing a proposition that is better than your competitors and going after it. In order to do this harness every skill in your business sales, marketing, product, strategy etc., you must start with leadership. Leaders that can combine an ability to listen to those on the ground and knowledge of what good looks like.

Don’t ask a marker to sell, and don’t ask a sales person to see the whole picture, get all the skills in the business to collaborate, and certainly don’t ask him to plan a campaign.