Why Do I Need to Bother with Marketing Anyway?
Posted by: Cheryl Clausen in sales marketing coaching, tags: marketing, sales marketing coachingIf you have plenty of people to sell to you may not think marketing is important. You may think whatever you are doing now is working just fine and there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken.
YET, if you are only closing 30% or less of your appointments you have marketing challenges that are causing a much higher cost per sale than it could be.
While some business owners, entrepreneurs, and soho’s would be floating on 
cloud nine if they could close 30% of their appointments that’s a pretty low closing ratio for most successful businesses… and a very expensive closing ratio at that.
The average cost per sale for face-to-face sales is around $200. But your cost per sale will be much lower than that if you can increase your sales closing ratio even a little bit.
The reason for lower sales ratios is likely to be ineffective marketing. Your marketing efforts should:
- Get the attention of the right potential buyers (prospects)
- Help those potential buyers (prospects) to self-select
- Get those potential buyers (prospects) to take action
- Develop a relationship that transitions strangers to buyers
- Increase your closing ratio above 30%
When you do a good job with your marketing your closing ratio can easily increase to +90% because you are only holding appointments with ready buyers.
Not only will effective marketing help you sell more… it will help you sell more at a lower cost. Plus it makes it easier to gain repeat business and referrals.
So if you have plenty of people to talk to and a low closing ratio the first thing you may want to look at adapting is your marketing efforts.
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August 31st, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Hi Cheryl,
I totally agree with you on this point. Marketing is everything!!! Well, not everything but a HUGE part. Good marketing can so increase your closing ratio because the marketing has taken the customer most of the way to the closing table.
I love looking at commercials and pinpoint, who has done their homework on marketing and who hasn’t.
Do you have any blogs on solely how to do good marketing vs. bad marketing? I’d be happy to look at those.
August 31st, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Check out the articles in the “marketing category” and the “sales marketing coaching” category.
I must confess I do the same thing when it comes to watching commercials. I actually get angry when I see advertisers completely blow it.