Message & Positioning

The Marketing Mix - Is there a better recipe?

By Nicholas B Oulton

A self-confessed food-porn addict, I was in thrall to Nigella Lawson last Sunday afternoon on her cookery show, rhapsodising as only she can about the thrills, and inevitable spills, of creating the perfect chocolate pudding. “It really doesn’t matter how many cocoa nibs you put in...” she oozed, folding together the kind of ingredients that are only readily available if you live next to Fortnum’s, “...what’s important is that the ones you put in get toasted just right.” In the kind of stupor that only this particular genre of info-tainment can engender, my mind wandered off to Monday morning business, carrying that last morsel of advice with it.

The proof of Nigella’s pudding is in the tasting, a delicate balance between sweetness and sharpness. The proof of the marketing recipes that businesses put together to improve top-line performance is in the annual return on investment (ROI), an equally delicate balance between marketing expenditure and revenue. The main difference between Nigella and a CFO is that most of us do not have unlimited budget for ingredients.

In the current business climate, deciding how to apportion marketing budget is harder than ever before. An intimidating menu of advertising platforms, strategies, viral and non-viral initiatives and subliminal media offers increasingly ingenious ways to tempt your prospects, yet your budget does not inflate in line with this multiplicity of options. In this state, managers of marketing budgets have to carefully assign budget to their choice of strategies, devise feedback mechanisms to benchmark effectiveness, and then decide how to fine-tune the campaigns to maximise top-line performance. Articulating your company’s value and finding ways to communicate it to your prospects is the purpose of marketing, but if the next step in the cycle – namely sales – is underperforming, your best marketing efforts will collapse. The trick is to ensure that however you acquire your leads, the ones you have “get toasted just right”.

What are your ingredients?

It is often helpful to conceptualise the sales cycle as a funnel: assuming that a campaign brings in 100 leads per month, if your sales conversion rate is around 10 per cent, you will close 10. Given this relatively simple equation, the obvious solution is to establish a sales target and retro-engineer your marketing initiatives to increase the number of leads generated. So we invest most of our budget into brochures, promotional CD-ROMS, commercials, print ads and the like, thereby increasing the number of leads that enter the funnel. But the equation is not nearly so simple. Acquiring more leads puts increasing pressure on the sales team, which will increase sales costs and start to eat away at the return.

For the CFO there is probably not much that can be done to mitigate the cost of sale, but one assumption has gone unexamined – namely that the conversion rate of your sales team is a constant. Increasing the number of prospects into your sales cycle is a good idea, but once you have them there, improving the conversion rate of your sales team is a far more efficient route to a better ROI.

The question is how can you achieve a step-change in sales performance without breaking the bank?

One key difference between marketing and sales is directness. Almost by definition, any form of marketing is indirect, in that it seeks to communicate without any actual contact between you and the prospect. Sales, however, is about personal direct communication. In both activities, we are aiming to convey a value message to a prospect, and we spend a lot of time and effort on advertising and promotion just to get our foot in the prospect’s door. What most companies fail to do, often quite spectacularly, is capitalise on the face-to-face business of selling that will ultimately win or lose the business.

Why does my marketing soufflé collapse?

On a recent plane trip back to the UK from San Diego, where I had spent the best part of a week attending a conference for a major client, my attention was drawn away from the latest small-screen blockbuster by the desultory sighing and humming of the gentleman sitting next to me, interposed with the frustrated laptop-tapping that typifies a familiar and ubiquitous form of modern torture. A glance at his screen confirmed it – endless 12pt bullet points against a garish background design. After breaking the ice, I discovered that my companion was a salesman for a software company, on his way to London to deliver a presentation that could close a deal worth $3m. Although I can’t name the company, I’m confident you will have seen their TV commercials and magazine ads, and possibly a few of the promotional brochures and CDs that littered my companion’s meal-tray (I use the word ‘littered’ advisedly, because all too often that is precisely what such materials become).

As we spoke, the poor guy was looking for a way to reduce the text size so he could cram yet more bullet points onto the slide. The other slides he flicked through had exactly the same format. I may have seen a pie chart in there somewhere; I certainly saw a lot of photographs, which seemed to serve as some kind of apology for the relentless text-tsunami that would soon be engulfing the audience.

It was clear that this salesman’s audience was destined to get roasted, not toasted – to be sedated by yet another presentation that failed to effectively communicate the value on offer. It seemed heartbreaking that the millions of dollars that had been spent on brand positioning, arousing interest and creating the opportunity was about to be undone by a dull and disengaging instance of Death by PowerPoint.

PowerPoint™ has had more than its fair share of bad press in recent years; in fact, if PowerPoint were a celebrity it would be Britney Spears – hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, soon becoming part of everyday life, and now something destructive and dangerous that you should keep your children away from. The truth is that PowerPoint is an extremely powerful tool when used properly, and by transforming the way salespeople use it, businesses can make a real difference to sales effectiveness and top-line results.

Reading a list of bullet points to the audience is an ineffective way of communicating value. We have all sat through this kind of presentation; indeed the situation is now so ubiquitous that a PowerPoint presentation is expected to be dull and boring. We are currently on the verge of a tipping-point in how PowerPoint is being used in sales, where an audience-focused, effective presentation can give your salespeople an immense competitive advantage.

How do you bake an irresistible presentation?

The reality is this: the most successful marketing initiative will only get your salesperson’s foot in the door. At best, it will get you a captive audience, a hugely valuable opportunity to get your message across and influence buying behaviour. At this stage the success of the sale depends on a few key factors:

• Does the presentation clearly articulate the benefits of buying from you and not the competition?
• Does the presentation engage the audience and hold their attention?
• Do the key messages pass into the audience’s long-term memory, so that they can influence buying behaviour when the decision is finally made?

Getting these things right takes time and practice, and a paradigm shift in how we think about presentations, but the rewards are considerable. Businesses that have put an audience-centric presentation approach into practice, addressing the three key points above, convert up to 40 per cent more leads into sales. That’s utilising their existing sales force, and sometimes even cutting back on marketing budget. Doesn’t halving your marketing expenditure and doubling your sales sound like a recipe for success?

Whichever way you look at it, diverting a small percentage of the marketing budget away from more brochures or extra airtime, and into a tool that will increase your sales effectiveness, could make all the difference to your top-line performance. Focusing less on lead generation and more on sales conversion means efficiently using the resources you already have, and ‘toasting’ the leads you bring in to perfection. Maybe only Nigella can make a chocolate soufflé rise, but with an effective, engaging, impressive and memorable presentation in your list of ingredients, you should be able to make your sales rise – and serve up something irresistible to your shareholders.

Downloads

The Marketing Mix - Is there a better recipe?
IT and Office TechnologyDownload PDF

You will have value - How to go in fighting for attention in presentations
UK, Salesforce - April 2006 - Download PDF