Just about all of us know that the funnel works like this -

1. Marketing generates awareness and interest, then leads
2. Sales qualifes leads, matches needs with solutions and closes business
3. Operations delivers your product or service
4. Marketing and sales find ways to upsell previously sold customers

But a HUGE percentage of the small business owners I’m hearing from are letting the inmates run the asylum!

They’re NOT marketing the way they know they should be because their sales team can’t get together and work from a consistent platform that can be leveraged for marketing purposes.

The newsletter’s not getting to too many folks.  They’re not doing direct mail because there are too many separate lists that overlap and are in different formats.  They’re not doing “touch” or “drip” marketing because each sales person organizes their prospects differently.  They’re not email marketing.  They’re not telemarketing. Etc…

If marketing is the top of the funnel, then failing to exploit the appropriate channels in your industry is restricting the size of your sales pipeline.

So enabling just one new marketing activity could have a powerful impact on your company’s growth!  But you’ve got to get the list of “targets” for that marketing organized… and it has to be integrated with the list of prospects your sales team is working.

And there it all comes to a screeching halt.

It seems that most business owners just don’t have the time to go through the brain damage of getting that done.

But WOW!  What a huge price you’re paying for NOT doing it!

It doesn’t have to be hard.  In fact, I would suggest that we too often get hung up on building the comprehensive contact management system that accomodates all scenarios.

Pick a marketing opportunity that you have reason to believe will deliver qualified leads to your sales team profitably.  Define a strategy strictly to conquer that opportunity.  Let that success build momentum and provide funding for widening the reach of your strategy.

Sure, this way there will be some exceptions – prospects that probably shouldn’t or should have been on that marketing list but your strategy didn’t account for that.  But, is that risk great enough to warrant staying stuck where you are?

Just do it!

Related posts:

1. “Contact Management Ain’t Easy, Its Essential”
2. Making Contact Management Work Webinar
3. ACT! and Outlook are Holding Your Business Back