Sales and Marketing Meets the Tortoise and the Hare

Sales and Marketing Meets the Tortoise and the Hare
What 19^th Century Fables Can Teach You About 21^st Century Business

Teddy Roosevelt had it right when he said, “If you build it they will come…” Of course, in Roosevelt’s case he was talking about shortening the amount of time it took ships to sail around an entire continent, but the premise is there. In the 21^st century, however, if you build it, you need to let them know it’s there, and then they will come!

You’ve run the gamut of pitching your idea, securing investors, and constructing your product, now it’s time to get it into the hands of consumers. What’s the trick? The first thing you need to do is stop, take a breath, and slow down.

With the information superhighway giving people new information and products—EVERY SINGLE SECOND—you need to find a way to stand out among the competition. The solution, a solid sales and marketing plan!

Your focus thus far in launching your start up has been at finding solutions to compete in a fast paced digital world. Sales and marketing, however, requires a combination of a slow methodical approach and a fast paced aggressive approach. Analyzing competition and trends is where it starts, and then it ends with a fast paced method to closing sales.

Outsmarting your competition is what will put you ahead. The sales and marketing races is a tortoise and hare competition, and in this race, you need to learn how to be both the tortoise and the hare.

How to be the Tortoise

Marketing takes planning and thinking. In order to effectively market your product, you need to study patterns and behaviors, and then you need to make a plan; without one, your business will fail. Like most everything else in 21^st century business, there are solutions that can help you develop your marketing plan.

Inbound link profiling is crucial when you are looking to market your product. Tools like Open Site Explorer will give you insight into your competition. With knowledge in your hands, you can stay one step ahead.

Data Mining is crucial when you are looking for essential information to market your product. You want to analyze customer buying patterns, trace financial trends, and profile potential clients. Tools such as Tableau can help you find the necessary information you need as well as share it with you team. Knowledge is power when it comes to marketing.

Email Marketing—One of the easiest ways to market your new product is through email marketing. After you’ve gathered all of the necessary data to determine trends and demographics a solid email marketing program like GetResponse can get information about your product into potential customers hands in a quick and simple fashion.

Speed it up—It’s Time to be the Hare

You’ve done your research, you’ve developed a solid plan that is conducive to your market, you’ve made sure to research your sales cycle, you’ve got all of financial prospects in place. Now it’s time to launch your sales! And by “launch” I mean, you need to hit the ground running. Similar to marketing, start-ups that turn to digital resources find much success using online tools to help increase sales.

Use a CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and it is a web application that aids businesses in developing relationships with current clients. It also helps to strengthen relationships with current clients. Here are three different CRM’s that each has a different approach to managing customer relationships:

• CRM for Contacts—For some businesses, a personal customer touch is the most important way to close sales. If this is your business, you want to consider a CRM like Agile that has been developed to aide in customer relations.
  
• CRM for Leads—Aggressive selling businesses that need to generate leads and close deals may need a CRM that is more dedicated to prospecting than customer relations. Zoho CRM offers a great solution for sales force automation that can help to convert leads into closed sales.
  
• CRM for Conversations—You may need to track your conversations carefully in your business. In that case, RadiumCRM can easily be integrated with your Gmail so you can keep all your conversations in one place.

You Don’t Need CRM. To some, CRM’s are not worth the time to learn them or the money to use them. So options like “You Don’t Need a CRM” become a better way to manage sales. The goal of this solution is very cut and dry and simple. It helps you turn leads and prospective clients into closed sales with little paperwork!

Unify Enterprise This powerful tool lets you manage all of your ecommerce outlets in one place. It streamlines all the accounting, paperwork, inventory, order management, and shipping in a single location. What that means to you is that regardless of where you customers shop, you have all of their info in one place. Reaching out to make one-time customers loyal clients becomes simple with the use of this solution.

Conclusion—Winning the Race

Sales and marketing are crucial to your business. By slowly developing a well thought out and well-researched plan, you can begin selling your product to the right clients at the right time. By adopting a tortoise hare type of thinking, you can be sure that you have the slow methodical approach to gathering data, and the fast aggressive edge that is necessary in a the cut throat business that is sales.

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