Time, money and recurrent sales.
Selling is a complex process based on trust. Trust is the element that causes the buyer’s need and/or urgency to have a certain product or service to bring it to your company and not to the competition.
The trust between the buyer, your company, the product or service you sell is built over time. 9-12 positive interactions of a potential buyer with a company, product or service are required in order for him to be willing to give him his initial confidence.
It is expensive for these 9-12 positive interactions to be generated by your sales team or you if you are in a business where you make sales yourself.
If time is money, time costs not only the salary money of those on the sales team. It is good to think about the money that they cannot generate in additional contracts because they spend time to build “from scratch” trust with every potential customer.
That’s why there is marketing! Marketing makes the sales effort “cheaper”, because it is expensive to “run” after customers and “start from scratch” in establishing trust with each other, to make the sale.
How does marketing help you? Through two essential mechanisms:
1) Put “honey” in the way of customers – All the information about your company, what products it makes or sells, what excellent services it offers, are attractively placed in the way of customers, online or offline (website, social media, shop, salon presentation, etc.). This is why it is important to be present in all places where customers look for information when they have a need or urgency regarding the products or services you sell!
2) Make the customer come “already interested” or “already convinced” towards you – Because he has information available about you, your company and what you offer, available in the online environment, on your company website and/or a social media, the client goes through 63% of the process of establishing trust through self-service. That’s why it’s important to put quality content in the online environment!
Is it that simple? At the level of basic principles, yes. It’s so simple. What makes the difference? There are 3 elements that you should consider in marketing:
1) In marketing do everything honestly and correctly – If the company is in the beginning, say so. If you have limited production capacity (only 50 chocolate cakes a day), be honest. Do not use in marketing and do not put online information that the customer cannot validate with the reality of your business.
2) Marketing is done every few days – For example, it is much more efficient to be present with a posting in the online environment every day, to promote it, than to put the most beautiful video about your company once on year. Trust is built through familiarity, and familiarity comes from frequent and pleasant “meetings”. This is why the online environment is so useful.
3) Trust has to be promised and delivered every time – Because trust is hard to come by, it is good to offer customers, every time, exactly what we promised: a quality product, a pleasant and efficient service, etc.
So, what do companies that don’t do marketing lose? The short and clear answer is: waste time, money and repeat sales.
1) They lose time because they have to spend 5-7 times more time with each potential client to establish trust, than in the case of similar companies that do marketing. If for a marketing company it takes 5 hours, in total, to convince a customer to buy a certain product, for those who don’t do marketing the time increases to 25-35 hours.
2) They lose money because during the greater time they strive to convince customers to buy what they offer they could, on average, make 5-7 times more sales. So, if your turnover is 50,000 euros a year and you don’t do marketing, you lose about 200,000-300,000 euros that you could generate through marketing relevant to your business.
3) They lose repeated sales that they could get more through marketing because people love to search and select what they want to buy in the online environment, and if you are not there they can not choose from your products or services.
