SearchNet Marketing Workshop

Trezza’s Law: Hope is not a sales tool.”

Integrated Attack Marketing
The Art of Escalation Dominance

Very few companies market their services well. There is often a lack of distinction between marketing and sales. The initiatives fail to support, reinforce, or enhance each other. The program fails to distinguish you from the pack, never mind from your toughest competitors. Money disappears into a black hole with no real monitoring of results, no executable action plan, and no way to fix the problem. Your SNC Marketing Workshop is a content-heavy two-day program that ends with a real-world, manageable, fully integrated marketing plan.

Ask yourself the following questions:
1) Exactly how do my marketing efforts distinguish me from the best of my competition in the minds of prospect decision-makers?

2) Are our marketing efforts fully integrated with Operations, Sales, and Client-Service? Do they support and reinforce one another?

3) How many clients can I point to and identify the clear connection between my marketing efforts and the sale?

4) Is our sales force professionally trained? If so, how and by who? How do they compare to the best in the industry? How do I know? Do I know exactly what my salesforce does and says at all times? Is it consistent with our message? What is our message?

5) What is the return on our marketing investment? Is the money we spend getting results? How do I know?

6) How many sales a year do we NOT get, because our efforts were less than the best?

If you are not THRILLED with the answers – SNC is your solution

  • SNC Marketing Training and Workshop
  • SNC Professional Sales Training
  • SNC Sales Management

SNC Marketing Workshop: The Art of Escalation Dominance

I. What is it? Rule # 1: “Every dollar you spend will bring in more than one dollar in return.”

A. The process by which you determine how every dollar can be spent most effectively.
B. Generate a positive return on your investment
C. Separates you from the pack.
D. Is fully integrated with operations, sales, and client service.
E. Is properly tested, executed and monitored.
F. You can draw a straight line from marketing to sales results

II. Why is SNC Attack Marketing different?

Because you start from your objective and reverse-engineer the process. You do not set a budget first! The budget is created to fund the plan, not the other way around. Because it is focused on and in support of sales, not the other way around. Because it is measurable in terms of success or failure. Because it is a workable, manageable plan.

III. How does it work?

Trezza’s Law: If it does not separate you from the pack it is devoid of innovative thinking.

A. Identify innovative initiatives that will command the attention of your target market(s)
B. Integrate all of the elements of your marketing program – everything must work together to drive sales:
a) The process must be fully integrated
b) You must identify innovative initiatives that will command the attention of your market
c) Integrate all elements so that they reinforce each other
d) Not getting a return? – STOP and switch gears

IV. Why does it work?

a) It separates and distinguishes you from the pack.
b) It is focused on sales (getting appointments)
c) It is cost justified
d) It is viral
e) Good marketing is a force multiplier

V. What does it mean for you?

Profitable growth

Marketing is not about spending money on advertising, direct mail, and PR. Those are only tools. Marketing is about growing your business, revenues, profit, and valuation.

VI. Acid Test

A. Have you ever done a cost-benefit analysis to determine if your marketing generates more revenue than it costs to produce?
B. Do you rely on a brochure? If yes,
1. What makes it different from the rest?
2. Do people read it? How do you know?
3. When was the last time someone said they were impressed by it?
4. When was the last time someone hired you because of it?
5. Can you track a single successful sale to your brochure? If no, why not?
C. Do people visit your website? How many?
a) Do those visits lead to sales?
b) Do you have a web strategy?
c) Is your website a call to action or just a brochure?
d) Does your site have valuable content or just pat phrases and a recitation of capabilities that are essentially the same for everyone?
D. The only two meaningful measures of return are:
a) Sales volume from new clients
b) Expanded business from current clients

VII. Integrate the sales process

Everything your salesforce does and says must reinforce your marketing message and materials – and vice-versa. The purpose of your marketing efforts must be to facilitate getting appointments with prospects. It must be focused on decision makers and their decision making process. If it does not accomplish that – we must immediately attack the problem and figure out why – reevaluate and change gears.

VIII. Train your salespeople properly

A. Professionalism
B. Accountability
C. Provide proper support
D. Methodology and approach must support why and how you are different from and better than your toughest competitors.

Every agency needs REAL, superbly trained salespeople in the marketing mix to close deals.

Unhappy agencies find themselves pressuring, cajoling, pleading, threatening, or turning over salespeople because they engage in a process that just isn’t professional – no matter how professionally they run the collection floor. Too often:

  • Their salespeople are not properly trained
  • Corporate goals and expectations have nothing to do with the realities of the marketplace
  • Sales activity is not properly managed, driven, or supported.
  • They spend money on the wrong things
  • They focus on end-results instead of the process that gets you there, so the end-results consistently do not meet expectations.
  • They hire the wrong people.

IX. Three Steps to a Better Sales Force

A. Eliminate mediocre salespeople and replace them with pros to improve company’s growth. Some salespeople really belong in client service.
B. Hire good salespeople and provide them with first-class training
C. Provide first-class management, tools, and support

X. Measures of Marketing Success (Return on Investment)

D. Better clients (must be client-defined)
E. More of them (must be client-defined)
F. Shorter sales cycle (must be quantified/defined)

XI. How to think about marketing

G. What is your selling value-proposition?
H. How are you different from your competition?
I. What specific benefits do the differences represent for the prospect?

XII. Justifying the Cost

(Rule #1 – every dollar spent will generate more than $1 in return)
J. You must determine how each part of the program is cost-justified
K. You have to think through what you want to accomplish and how that will distinguish you from the competition BEFORE you spend money on marketing (Strategy + Tactics)

XIII. Principles of Marketing Strategy

L. Your marketing efforts are in total alignment with your company’s growth / profit / value-building objectives
M. You are clear about your unique selling proposition – You can stand for one primary thing – You must avoid confusing your prospective clients
N. You know what it will take to reach your broadest possible audience for your services
O. Qualified prospects will find your offer and approach nearly impossible to resist

XIV. Principles of Marketing Tactics

P. You must be able to describe what you are selling in a single sentence.
Q. Differentiate what you are selling from your competition in such a powerful way that hiring anyone else’s service will strike the prospect as unwise.
R. Determine the best prospects to sell to.
S. Have a well-defined, organized, manageable system in place that enables you to sell efficiently.
T. Capture and qualify leads – this process must be extremely well organized, tracked, and managed.
U. Effectively cross-sell your services to clients and prospects
V. Grow your business so it snowballs – so that sales leads to sales (viral marketing)

XV. How do you transition from wasting money to making sales?

The mission must shift from an exercise of creating a “slicker something” than the competition to creating a powerful marketing/sales tool to drive sales. Your focus must move from “bragging rights” to the battlefield.

XVI. Starting with a blank page

W. Your marketing doesn’t work because it looks like everybody else’s.
X. What is your value proposition?
a) Develop a strategy for winning new clients based on the value proposition of your services.
b) The value proposition must be deliverable in ONE SENTENCE.
c) The value proposition must distinguish you from your competition

If your sales proposition does not demonstrate clear, definable value for the prospect that the prospect will understand AND EMBRACE, you will NOT advance. You will not get the appointment which means that you will not make the sale.

XVII. A Checklist of Common Marketing Management Mistakes

You created the budget first, Goals second
– How will marketing help you grow out of the sales slump?
– Who are the targets of the marketing campaign?
– What messages will position you as THE credit solution?
– What goals will it seek to achieve?
– How will the campaign be measured?

Trezza’s Law: You cannot manage what you cannot measure

The gullibility factor: Don’t buy into ad campaigns that don’t have a direct relation to revenue production.
– The plan must take your target-market prospects into account
– Results must be monitor-able
– Clearly defined goals must be established, tracked, and be the centerpiece of the program’s ongoing evaluation
– The plan/program/initiative must be integrated with all of your efforts

XVIII. Taking the Real-World Test

The “acid test” is new business. Weak salespeople do not build your business. Some just can’t sell it. The title means nothing. If you have people like that (after they have received proper professional sales training and support) they must deliver or be replaced. Period.

Execution is about performance – not just about following a recipe –
This is where the rubber meets the road. Deliver or die.

XIX. Avoiding Slippage

Slippage results from a management failure to properly follow-up, monitor, and address failures to execute on the initiatives you have launched. Employees will slip back into old ways of doing things. Some employees will try and take a “wait and see” attitude because they expect new initiatives to be mostly talk and little to no follow up or enforcement.

Indicators of slippage:
– Failure to execute on training
– Failure to enforce new methods or procedures
– Failure to absorb or learn everything associated with the initiative
– Implement only part of the recipe

Problem: After an extremely intense two days of training in new methodology / approach, strategy or tactics; there can be significant slippage between what is learned and what is implemented.

Solution: Do not fall prey to previously long established daily routine and slip back into business as usual.

  • Set blocks of time to review.
  • Have team meetings re: implementation and execution, review and assessment
  • The longer you wait, the harder it is to execute brilliantly.
  • Senior management MUST be committed / involved

XX. Are you ready?

– Analyzing your past efforts
– Analyzing your capacity for change

XXI. Implementation / Execution

A. Stop all existing programs unless you can prove that it is working (producing substantial revenues)

B. We will list each initiative and write down the reason you conduct it.

C. We will list and categorize the marketing initiatives you do not conduct and why

D. It’s Got to Tie Together

Day II: THE WORKSHOP

Objective: Create a fully integrated executable marketing plan.

Key Questions:
1) Will the marketing tool or initiative simply replicate what you are already doing?
2) Should the dollars be allocated to something else?
3) Should you shrink the budget or expand it?
4) Do you have the talent internally to do the job exceptionally well?

Focus on the sweet spots that will produce the most significant returns. That sometimes means other good ideas will have to be tabled.

A. Message
Is your message powerful and compelling enough to command the attention of your target market(s)?

Every effort, statement, position, action, and attitude must support the above.
Reinforce the message with repeated impressions in a variety of media with a consistent approach:

  • SNC sales approach – not canned pitches
  • Impressive marketing materials to support the message and encourage appointments
  • Address the “whys” to reinforce belief
    a. Link the message to the value of the appointment
    b. Build credentials using and leveraging clients and client endorsements
    c. Cross-sell

What is the message that will make certain that you are perceived in a compelling manner that provides a powerful competitive advantage and an overwhelming motivation / incentive to hire your services?

B. Plan of Attack
Creating the Action Plan
Execution
Key Objectives

  • Turn your name into a real brand with depth and excitement to drive your growth
  • Develop an unquestionable clearly understandable competitive advantage
  • Increase the number of appointments with qualified prospects
  • Cross-Selling Frenzy
  • Increase the average volume from new clients
  • Increase volume from current clients
  • Enhance the business model to facilitate national expansion

C. Action Items with Timelines
SLOW AND STEADY DOES NOT WIN THE RACE!!!
a. Each Vertical Market
b. Buying Influences

D. Integration:
Is it fully integrated? Are you consistent and persistent in taking your message to the marketplace, as opposed to dabbling in marketing? Does each element of your marketing reinforce the other?

E. Execution: Getting results!

  • Plan
  • Meeting and progress review schedule
  • Resource management
  • Launch
  • Monitor
  • Evaluate
  • Adjust
  • Launch

F. Monitoring and Evaluation
Are you doing everything possible to wring incremental revenue out of every marketing dollar you spend?
Is it working?

G. Commitment
Commitment requires the determination to take things to the max in every way and to make certain that there are no exceptions.

This is a key difference between companies that grow in market share, power, and clout – and those that don’t (or have to buy business in order to grow because they cannot generate organic growth). You must be fully committed to being a firm that soars. Stagnation is death. You cannot remain in one place and survive. There is no staying in place. Companies that fail to effectively strive for growth inevitably fall behind, shrivel, and die.

You must be determined to execute, monitor, and manage every element and aspect of the program and to make sure that there are NO EXCEPTIONS!