Excerpt from Marketing by the Numbers
Most products don’t sell
themselves.
They need to be promoted effectively to people who have a
reason to buy them. Marketing
is the business function responsible to identify those people
and to initiate profitable
relationships. Effective marketing delivers a
stream of motivated, qualified buyers to the sales channel
enabling sales to focus on developing major opportunities and
closing orders rather than scattering their efforts cold calling
and qualifying suspects. Freeing sales from tasks more cost
effectively performed by marketing creates a lower cost of
sales. When marketing does its job,
channel resources are
more productive.
Close ratios improve thus leading to “above plan” order
performance. And when marketing and sales are in synch, the
bottom line can show improvement through the compounding
of increased revenues and lower cost.
But too often—in companies large and small—this is not the
case because marketing relies on hunches and best guesses
feeding sales unprocessed fodder. Marketing teams amass huge
mailing lists and advertise to hundreds of thousands of people,
hoping good customers will somehow emerge from the enormous
universe of suspects. Marketing communicators, intent on cutting
through the media clutter, routinely package their messages in
creative concepts that snag attention but don’t resonate with
real customers. Incomplete or weak
message are overwhelmingly costly in relation to their
effectiveness.
They cause management to lose confidence in marketing and to slash promotional budgets. They cause salespeople to become disenchanted and revenues to sputter.
