Introduction to the Sales and Marketing Machine

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

If your business is suffering from any of the following symptoms, then this series of articles is for you:
You have sales process that feels broken, with bookings that are less than you hoped for
You need to grow bookings fast, but you don’t have a repeatable or scalable process
Bookings are unpredictable
It is costing you more in sales and marketing to to acquire your customers than you make from each sale
Sales is unhappy with marketing and wants more leads
Marketing is doing a lot of things, but they don’t seem to be clearly leading towards a sale
Marketing is unable to show the ROI on their programs

Definition: What is a Sales & Marketing Machine

A sales & marketing machine is a scientifically designed process to take suspects and convert them to customers. It has the following attributes:
Scalable, so that it can be cranked up when needed
Automated where possible, so that it requires minimal manual intervention
Instrumented with a Dashboard that provides Key Performance Indicators
The levers that can be pulled to grow sales are well understood
Results are predictable
There is a clear understanding of costs and returns
Marketing is tightly aligned with sales
Every step has a clear purpose of moving the prospect further down the process, and leads directly to a subsequent step

The sequence of steps
Building the machine involves the following steps:
Identify your buyers
most of the time when I work with people to diagnose what is not working as well as they hoped, the problems arise because they have not found a good way to motivate their customer to move forward through a particular step.
This happens because they have designed their sales process from their point of view, and not created a customer-centric process. A good way to make sure you are building a sales process that will work for your customers, is to diagram out their buying process. This will help make sure you have appropriate steps in your sales process to address the issues and questions they need answered before they will purchase from you.
I recommend starting by identifying the different job functions that are involved in purchasing your product or service.
Diagram their buying processes
Once you have each player identified, I recommend diagramming the buying process for each individual. Only when you are armed with this information, can you properly design your own sales and marketing process.
The flow chart below was produced using an excellent flow charting program called SmartDraw that I highly recommend for this purpose.
 it is important to repeat this step for all other players that are involved in the sales cycle.
Add to this diagram the steps you will take to address their buying process
This next stage involves adding the steps that you can take to address the concerns and needs of the prospect that you identified in the prior stage diagram. Those steps are shown here in the beige color.
Diagram the Actions you will take to move prospects through the process
The concept behind this part of the process is that we are breaking down a complex sales cycle into a smaller set of Actions that should result in movement of the prospect through the sales cycle. Later on when we instrument the machine, we will want to track how many people went through a particular Action, and how many of them were we able to successfully move to the next step 
Examine the linkages between Actions to make sure the next steps are obvious
In my view, no startup can afford to do any kind of marketing activities that don’t directly contribute to the process of moving a prospect through to a closed deal.
Define the qualification criteria
This happens because there wasn’t a discussion between sales and marketing where they mutually agreed on a clear definition of what represents a Qualified Lead that is acceptable to sales. Getting the lead to that level of qualification (often referred to as a Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL) is the responsibility of the marketing department.
Examine the customer motivations for each Action
This step represents one of the most important and powerful aspects of this methodology. If you started off by looking carefully at your customer’s buying process, you are already beginning to think the right way. But this step takes things further. To this well, you will need to get inside your customers head, and learn to think the way they do.
For each Action that you want your customer to do in your sales process, ask the following questions:
What concerns are they likely to have that will make them not want to take this action?
What motivations might they have that will make them want to take this action?
Define the organizational resources responsible for each step
Define the technology/software that you will use to automate the process

Solving Blockage Points

In my experience, most blockage points are caused because the customer is not interested or motivated to do what you want them to do as the next step in your sales cycle. This comes from designing a process from the your point of view instead of from the customer’s. The solution to these blockage points comes by building a sales process that is truly customer centric. This can be done by simply studying your customers’ concerns and motivations at each stage in the sales cycles, and making sure that your sales process addresses their concerns, and ensures that there is a good alignment between what motivates them, and what you are wanting them to do next in the sales cycle.

Sounds simple, and the good news is that it actually is simple.

To help you with this stage, I recommend looking at each phase in the cycle where you have a problem, and following these four steps:

List their Concerns
List their Motivations
List the Tools that you could use to solve their concerns and align your process with their motivations.
Experiment with different motivational tools, and track the different conversion results

The best way to give you a feeling for this is to provide an example. Let’s take the problem of how to get visitors to your web site to register and give you their contact information:

Concerns
Don’t want to be on yet another spam mailing list
Don’t want to be bothered by sales people following up
Motivations
Interested in education around this particular space
Interested in learning more about your product/service
Tools available to address concerns and motivations
Offer something of considerable value to them after they have registered. The value of what you offer has to provide motivation that considerably outweighs their concerns.
Consider not asking them for their registration information until very much later in the process when they are more committed, or when you have already proven value to them. For example, let them download a free trial to your product, and after they have downloaded it, ask them for their contact information to activate the trial.

Time to Wow
Mini wow: A moment where your buyer sees something cool and exciting.
Motivates them to continue exploring
Full Wow: The moment your buyer gets excited to buy

How many steps?
How much time does it take
How much friction is involved

Remove steps and remove friction
Remove steps to sign up and using app
Remove work the customer needs to do to use the app as if its real (use sample data!)
Or do the work for your customer!
Use a funnel diagram and break down each step into minifunnels

Sales Process
Build Relationship
Build Trust
Consult

Design a funnel that delights, entices and motivates buyers

Unstarred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Introduction to the Sales and Marketing Machine

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker