Guide to sales and marketing

Everything you need to know to develop an in-depth marketing plan for a small business

Adam Mertz, VP of Social Development at The Social Concept, gives you the ten most important core concepts of sales and marketing today. This will affect your marketing plan for your small business and, ultimately, how you create and retain customers, and how you will obtain revenue. You’ll also learn:

• The five stages of your customer's buying cycle
• Evaluating a lead's “BANT”: budget, authority, need and timeline
• Visualizing your campaign
• Tying it all together into a 90-day marketing plan

Understanding the stages

If you’ve never written a sales and marketing plan before, I wouldn’t recommend writing a super-detailed 20-page sales and marketing plan. Instead, this is the moment that you will want to put on your Steven Covey hat, and think like the late, great author. If you’ve ever read Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” the second habit states that you should “Begin With The End In Mind 9.”

The goal of the marketing plan is to get massive amounts of prospective customers into Awareness, then Consideration, and then the sales plan’s goal is to get them through their Preference and Intent stage, all the way to Purchase.

Let’s begin the Sales and Marketing plan by figuring out what your “end” should look like. Let’s say your business wants to create $5M in revenue in the next 90 days, and you typically sell $500 worth of product to each customer. This means that you’ll need 10,000 deals this quarter.

Assuming that 50% of the proposals or quotes that you write for your customers become closed opportunities, you’ll need 20,000 sales-qualified leads. This means that you’ll need somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 leads, which means that you’ll need to make half-a-million to a million people aware of your company.

That big “half-a-million-to-a-million number” is where your marketing plan begins. You see, the marketing plan is the plan to choose various types of media (social media, advertising, PR, outdoor media, etc.) to simply make people aware of your company - get them into the Awareness stage - so that they can then begin to consider your firm in their Consideration stage. Your sales plan doesn’t even come into play until the customer is in the Preference and Intent phase because they don’t even want to talk to your company until then.