Geared For Profit

The Guy Kawasaki  video reminded me of something I was talking about recently.

You need to make a machine, that starts at the customer’s wallet, and goes all the way to your bank account. Starts with the customer, via marketing, sales, delivery and support.

It start with giving value to the customer, and having a meshed organisation, so the customer/marketing/sales/product all works together to extract the sale. This may seem obvious but hard to do. Poor sales performance doesn’t require better sales training, or better/new sales people, it needs more cohesion between sales & marketing, and marketing & the customer. If this all meshes, then each piece is easy and natural.

A good example of poor meshing is software development. Customer asks:
“what do you do?”
“software development, using xcf method with agile computing and cloud components”  …. this means NOTHING to the customer.
customer asks : “can you program CRMs for my website”
“yes we can”
customer asks : “can you help with our monthly budget reporting ?”
“yes we can”
customer asks : “would I be able to get monthly sales ROI month on month for website sales ?”
“yes, I’ll get back to you on that in a proposal”

Given you do everything, sales and marketing aren’t able to be specific about anything. This is the real swiss army knife approach, we do everything, which might even be true. But you can’t effectively market or sell ‘everything’.