Marketing Operations

When you design your activities around what creates value for the buyer, you’ll avoid a common trap that marketing and sales gets caught in. This trap is one where marketing and sales view anyone that comes across the transom as a prospect, where their actions create buyer resistance, and where they spend all their energy overcoming that resistance.

If you deliver value to the buyer throughout the buying process, you’ll transform your efforts from a battle of wills and a numbers game into an exercise where you spend your energy finding and helping people with problems you know how to solve.

Create value for the buyer

How do you create value? By answering buyer questions and solving buyer problems throughout their journey. Using the knowledge from your Customer Value Maps, you help the buyer to:

  • Become aware and educated about the causes of their problems
  • Decide which problem to address and when to address it
  • Explore all obvious, familiar ways to find a solution without choosing a new vendor or product/service
  • Identify criteria for using an external resource to solve the problem
  • Examine whether the internal teams have the skills to manage through the disruption of deploying a new solution
  • Evaluate alternative solutions, including the financial implications
  • Implement the solution – on time and with minimal disruption

When you break the buyer’s journey into manageable chunks you can develop the actions that create value for the buyer at each stage. And you can ask the buyer to take action in order to receive the value you offer.

Measure your results

Measure the results of your actions. You’ll develop a clear picture of how many people are traveling through your pipeline and how quickly they are moving. In fact, if you’re not going to measure your results, why bother? It will be impossible to know what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll be investing precious resources with no indication of the return you are getting.

By mapping your marketing activities to the steps in the buyer’s journey, you’ll develop a marketing process that:

  • attracts the attention of the right buyers
  • nurtures a relationship with them
  • facilitates the internal buying decisions they must make
  • produces qualified leads for your sales staff

How well you create, sequence, and measure your marketing and sales actions will determine much of your success. The other factor in your success will be your ability to communicate persuasively to your buyers.