When it come to improving your business building efforts, it’s important to know if you have a sales problem or a marketing problem. Sales and marketing are often lumped together, but they require different skill sets and tools in order to be effective. Below are some symptoms that may help you diagnose whether the issue you are facing is a sales problem or a marekting problem.
Common Marketing Problems:
- You don’t receive referrals
- You are always “hunting” – your prospects are not finding you on their own
- Your current customers are buying products and service you provide from someone else because they “didn’t know you did that”.
- The sale is easy once you get in front of the right people – you just need to find more of the right people
- You compete solely on price.
- People like you as a person, but they are not quite sure what it is you really do.
- “Feast or famine” is a good way to describe your pipeline.
Common Sales Problems:
- After giving a proposal or submitting a bid, you can never get the prospect to return your calls
- You get tied up in long cycles of objection -> overcome objection, objection -> overcome objection, etc.
- You give lots of free advice to prospects who never buy
- You would rather do anything than make a prospecting call
- You seem to always get beaten down on price
- You have a high percentage of back outs do to buyers remorse
These lists are far from complete. What symptoms/challenges do you see in your business?
