Episode 3 Creating and Tracking Your Sales and Marketing Plan

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed, the premier podcast for innovative growth strategies hosted by two seasoned experts. Meet Evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group, a master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience. Evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services, the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency. An expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.

Speaker 2: 1:08

And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews, with my co-host, evan the man Polin, and today, this episode, episode three, we're going to be talking about creating and tracking your sales and marketing plan, and I'm going to say this before we really get started. I understand, I understand now why some of you guys confuse sales and marketing. There's a lot of similarities in the marketing plan and the sales plan, but they are not the same. But before we get going, before we really get started into this episode, I'm going to have Evan, my guy, introduce himself to you all Evan.

Speaker 3: 1:47

So thanks, craig, I appreciate it. Evan Polin, president of Polin Performance Group, and I help my clients with sales coaching, sales consulting, and my goal is really making sure that my clients are growing their businesses, closing more clients, increasing revenue, doing it at higher margins and with a shorter sales cycle. And, craig, I am really happy to be co-hosting this podcast with you. And Craig, quick question for you before we jump into today's topic in terms of creating and tracking the sales and marketing plan, almost afraid to ask. Last week we compared dating apps to marketing and sales. How much trouble did you get in with your wife and are you still married?

Speaker 2: 2:32

I am still married. Hopefully she hasn't heard this episode yet, but I'm sure that once she hears it there's going to be quite a big discussion. But until that day happens, I am a happy guy. I'm a happily married man. So, in terms of my introduction, again, I'm Craig Andrews, president of Beholder Agency, and we are the growth marketing agency for small to medium sized businesses who are looking to grow their business year after year. From a marketing perspective, growth is different for us, whether it be revenue, whether it be subscribers, whether it be just an audience. Growth Marketing encompasses all of that, and we help our clients get to that point. So, evan, let's start off the discussion talking about the challenges that occur when there is no sales or marketing plan. Go ahead, what do you think?

Speaker 3: 3:21

I'd actually like to start with a quote. This is probably something that a lot of you have heard before, but I think it's a great way to start today's episode. If you fail the plan, then you plan to fail the biggest challenge, and I'm going to talk about it from a sales perspective. Craig's going to talk about it from a marketing perspective. If you do not have goals in mind, if you don't know what you want to accomplish, it's going to be really, really, really difficult to get there. So, as we go through today's episode, we really want to focus on making sure that you have the end goal in mind, you have a good sense of what you want to accomplish, and we really want to make sure that you are defining for yourself, for your own organization, what success means, what failure means and we may get into it a little bit today, but failure is not fatal.

Speaker 3: 4:14

Failure is just not accomplishing the goals that you set out to accomplish and, quite frankly, a lot of my clients' greatest success comes from initially failing, then taking a step back, figuring out what lessons can be learned from those failures and then going back and making tweaks and making changes.

Speaker 3: 4:33

But if we do not have those goals in place. If we don't know what we are shooting for, what we want to accomplish, then it's really, really difficult to know whether or not you got there. It's really difficult to know what we need to keep, what we need to switch out. So the first thing that we really need to do is focus on what we want to accomplish and make sure that we are clearly defining what we want to accomplish. As we get into today's episode, we may talk about smart goals a little bit, but that is the first thing we need to talk about. Craig, from your perspective, from a marketing perspective, what do you see in terms of challenges when organizations don't have goals, set goals or use throwing darts at a dartboard as the way in terms of how they set their goals?

Speaker 2: 5:21

Thanks, evan. So in a lot of cases, what we do from a marketing perspective is we look from the end goal right to your point, back to the beginning. So when we're talking about clients who don't have the marketing plan into place, some of the things that happen is there's just a general lack of direction, and then when there's a lack of direction in marketing, that means something very fatal, which is the inefficient use of their resources, and those resources are time, money and usually manpower. So if any of those things are disrupted in terms of not having a direction, you're spending a lot of money to try to find a direction, you're spending a lot of time to try to find a direction, and you're surely wasting a lot of your employees' time and money and effort and anything they do. You're wasting that as well.

Speaker 2: 6:10

In addition to that, there's also a difficulty in measurement of the marketing campaign. So in our other episodes we spoke about how marketing blames sales and sales blames marketing. A lot of the problems that you're going to have is that the difficulty in measurement comes from a lack of the plan, and so another point to make to that is missed opportunities. So there might be. How many times have we had a situation where we say, oh, I should have been at that convention or I should have been in front of that client, or I should have been right. That's a missed opportunity, and only because you didn't have plan or you plan to fail to find that solution. And finally, the inconsistent brand messaging that comes from the lack of a plan. Going back to our dating scenario, imagine having a profile up there with I don't know who's the hot guy now Tom Selleck. I don't know that's the show.

Speaker 2: 7:03

I thought you were going to say Craig Andrews. Well, listen, compliments will get you everywhere, but if you had somebody else's face up on your profile, you're sending out the wrong message, and that happens a lot. So that's some of the things that can go wrong with the inconsistent plan, or just a plan that's not really developed well enough.

Speaker 3: 7:22

Right, craig. I think the other thing we've both seen is this the finger pointing back and forth.

Speaker 3: 7:28

So, if there is not a well-defined plan and if all of the stakeholders are not on the same page in terms of what the plan is, there's lots of finger pointing, going back back and forth. Again, you talked before about the wasted time, the wasted money. But if the business owner, if the president, if the CEO, isn't clearly defining a vision and again, that vision can have input from sales, marketing, product development, services, you know whoever else, but there needs to be a clear direction. This is how I'd like the business to grow. These are the kinds of clients that are our most profitable clients and, again, they may be getting a lot of that input from marketing, from other folks within the organization, and this is what we're going after. And then marketing is included to say, okay, I understand what we're looking to do. Let's now develop strategies around how we're going to get there and how we're going to get in front of that right audience.

Speaker 3: 8:26

And then, if sales isn't on the same page in terms of, okay, yes, the feedback that I've heard from the marketplaces, yes, this is correct. And yes, let's identify what are their pain points, what are their problem points, how are we going to sell the right products and services? Again, when they're all aligned, it's a beautiful thing and really accelerates the growth of the organization. But if any one of those three points aren't there, if there's any miscommunication back and forth, that's where we get back to the finger, pointing the inefficiencies, the OGs I should have been at that trade show, or oh, why were we running this campaign? Why were we trying to attract these kinds of clients? These are all the wrong leads and all these were all the wrong kinds of clients. We need everybody on the same page and unfortunately there's not too many of us out there who can read minds. So if it's not clearly articulated and, quite frankly, if it's not in writing and if we're not having regular meetings to ensure that everybody's on the same page, that's when we run into a disaster.

Speaker 2: 9:34

And I'll add to that and say, unfortunately, this part of the process of developing that business or sales or marketing plan is just boring. It's not exciting, it's not sexy. So usually the boring work is really where the foundation of everything is built from a marketing and sales perspective. You have to do the research, you have to ask the questions. It's not something where I can go look what I did out there. I had a Super Bowl ad. Well, that Super Bowl ad started with the basics of research, the basics of asking those questions.

Speaker 2: 10:04

The head of Coca-Cola is saying we're going to do a Super Bowl ad and the people behind the scenes, the sales and the marketing people, asking those right questions of who are we talking to? Or, better yet, they already had it laid out and are in a position where they're fulfilling that vision. And that's really the key part of doing these sales and marketing plan is it's boring and you got to do the hard work. So, as we move into the next part, we talked about the bad side, evan. What's the good side of having it?

Speaker 3: 10:34

The good side of having a plan and having a written plan in place, and I had alluded to smart goals before. So, as we're setting goals, whether it's on the sales side or the marketing side, the goal should be specific, they should be measurable, they should be attainable. Again, we like reach goals, we like to stretch, but they should be a goal that the organization actually has a chance of accomplishing. They should be realistic and there should be a timetable involved when we want to accomplish those goals by and here, where again the sales and the marketing are very similar.

Speaker 2: 11:11

They're exactly the similar right Because you can, you can, we can market to everybody, but without a time limit of knowing when it works. It's just. It's just, it's fallible right. It doesn't have any type of foundation to it.

Speaker 3: 11:24

And as we get through today's episode, at one point we're going to get to KPIs, which stands for key performance indicators, to know whether or not it's working or not. But when we've got all of these things in place, when it works well, when we're tracking all of these things, once we have the written goal, when things are working, we can say, okay, great, yeah, we were, you know, targeting this type of client. We did this kind of campaign to get in front of them, the salespeople who knew who they were in front of, they knew what the ping point should be and how to quickly qualify or disqualify those opportunities. And when we're able to track those things, when we see what's working as an organization, we can go okay, that's interesting, okay, we're seeing a lot of results there. How can we do more of that? That's right.

Speaker 3: 12:14

And if something's not working, rather than getting to the end of the year or getting to November and going, oh God, well, there's no way to hit our goals, we're only at 50% and we only have two or three months left in the year, we can quickly look at okay, let's give it a period of time, let's track it. If it's not working. We can then go and look, we can see why it's not working, we can figure out what tweaks, what pivots. Or do we throw that strategy out altogether and focus on the things that are working?

Speaker 2: 12:45

And so here's where I'll make a little plug for growth marketing, which is the industry that we specialize in. The process of growth marketing is about doing a bunch of little tests, a little bit of marketing campaigns to fail quick. You talked about failing earlier. The importance of failing quick versus waiting to extrapolating those long failures is that you can make quick adjustments to your point earlier From the perspective of running an ad campaign on social media and helps you narrow down who potentially your target is based off of those data points that come from that campaign.

Speaker 2: 13:22

You don't run necessarily a PPC campaign, a pay-per-click campaign, for two, three years without knowing who you're targeting. That's just ridiculous and you'll be blowing tons of money. There goes the waste of the resources. I'm not having a plan to the point of what you got to before, which is being very detailed about how you use your resources. Failing quick allows you to make the adjustments to even the salespeople who are giving you feedback and comparing the two in terms of what the sales team is saying next to the marketing team. But you really do want to fail quick as best as possible. That's not a negative thing. That's actually a very positive thing to the plan, because when you go to do the actual bigger spending in the campaign, you know exactly who you're talking to, to the target that you're referencing.

Speaker 3: 14:10

I'm guessing it's a lot less expensive to fail quick than it is to fail slow and fail over a long period of time.

Speaker 2: 14:18

That's usually the case, right.

Speaker 3: 14:22

So the other thing I'd like to say in a minute I'll get into kind of the pillars of having a strong business development plan. But one of the things that I have done for my 22 years in consulting something that I insist that all of my clients do in terms of tracking and measuring is for my clients, for every opportunity in the pipeline, I have them track where that came from. If there was marketing campaigns, what was the campaign? If it was a trade show, what was the show? If it was a referral, where did we get the referral from? And all of my clients, every opportunity they have in the pipeline, and again, whether they're tracking it in HubSpot, salesforce, pipedrive, in an Excel spreadsheet they have where that opportunity came from.

Speaker 3: 15:10

So over time our best clients we can see if there's any similarities in terms of where those come from. Again, so if we can identify that, we can do more of that. And if there are clients that weren't profitable weren't our best clients? Again trying to look at how we got in front of them, where they were, and are there things that we can stay away from because they're not bringing us our ideal opportunities. But I've got to tell you for the last 20 years, everything in my pipeline. I've identified.

Speaker 2: 15:38

What activity or what groups of activities did I do To get in front of those opportunities so I can replicate those things that work really well, yeah, and drop the stuff that we're not kind of not seeing any ROI from and I'll tell you, one of the things that you're touching upon there, which I'm sure we'll do in future episodes, is you're touching upon the technology of a CRM, and so there's quite a few business owners who go out there that I've talked to go. What's a CRM? Crickets right, what's a CRM? And we're going how are you Measuring those, those key points that you just referenced there?

Speaker 2: 16:14

Having a CRM allows you to have those data points. Now, if you, if you don't, if you only use a spreadsheet, there's a limitation to a spreadsheet, but to have that CRM in place Allows you to be able to get to that information quickly. And if you're a bigger organization, you're allowed to share that information among other team members in the program and you'll know what the others are doing to make sure that you're not wasting time Again, not hitting those goals that you have set out to to accomplish in the first place. So I thought that was a good point in terms of the the plotting, each one of the points that that you're talking about.

Speaker 3: 16:49

Right in Organizations that I've worked with in the past and organizations that I've seen in the past that grow through acquisition, oftentimes have a very difficult time Because you know they'll let different branch offices do things different ways, not everybody's on the same system and then it's impossible for that owner, that president, that CEO to get a vision of what's going on with the entire Organization. Yeah, so the other thing I would strongly suggest whether there's different divisions, if those divisions are siloed, if different offices are siloed, there needs to be one process, one plan that everybody's using so that there is visibility Into success or lack of success. Otherwise, again, a company may have been okay getting from a million to five million or five million to ten million, but if they don't put processes in place and if they're not able to get visibility into that, going to be very difficult to go from ten to twenty or twenty to fifty. If we've got things all over the place and if it's really difficult to track again what's working, what's not working across the organization.

Speaker 2: 17:57

That makes sense.

Speaker 3: 17:58

So you were talking about KPIs, evan, did you get all your points in reference to the the strong business plan stuff that you so, actually, with the small business plan, let me go through a couple of the pillars big picture for the, for the, for a good Plan when it comes to business development. So first, what part of what we hit on is one, what are the goals? So, what are we looking to accomplish? How many new clients? How much revenue? What different product lines Are we looking to sell? What different service lines Are we looking to sell? We should be looking at what we should be looking at. What is our budget For sales and marketing? These trade shows aren't cheap. Professional organizations aren't cheap. Seo, paperclip, all the marketing things are doing so as an organization. What is their budget? And if they've got, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 18:46

Craig. So what I would say in that sales and marketing, make sure it's a global budget in addition to split between sales and marketing.

Speaker 3: 18:54

Just to just like add a clearing point there and then, within that, to make sure that you've got a budget for each individual salesperson within the organization so that you're not going haywire because, again, left hand and right hand don't know what each other is doing. Next, what we look need to look at is what sales activities Are you proactively doing To get in front of opportunities? So, whether it's cold calls, whether it's emails, whether it's asking for referrals, cross-selling, upselling, belonging to professional associations, going to trade shows, doing talks, doing webinars, whatever it might be, you need to look at what activities make sense, based on who you're looking to target and based on your budget. Sales people also need to look at how much time do they have.

Speaker 3: 19:47

I work in some with some non-traditional organizations when it comes to sales law firms, accounting firms, service-based firms, where the professionals are also responsible for business development, so they may be servicing clients 40 45 hours a week and they may only have three to five hours a week for sales and business development. I'm working with traditional sales organizations where salespeople should be spending 40, 45, 50 hours a week selling. A plan for somebody selling three to five hours a week Looks a lot different than a plan for somebody selling 40 hours a week. So we need to look at realistically how much time we need to have. And then the last thing we need to look at and we've touched on it a little bit already today Measuring return on investment.

Speaker 2: 20:31

How much?

Speaker 3: 20:32

time are we spending doing certain activities? How much is it costing? How many prospects came into the pipeline and then what percentage of those prospects closed? So we know whether or not the lift of doing certain things is worth the time and money that it's costing.

Speaker 2: 20:49

And so let me piggyback on that in terms of the marketing perspective, a couple things that we use, and there's more. There's a lot. I'm just going to try and get to the chase on it. For us, we're going to measure the customer acquisition cost. How much did it cost us to actually get that client customer to our business and door and signed off? Did we spend X amount of money on a PPC campaign? Did we spend X amount of money on a social media campaign? Did we go out to an event? All of those are added to the customer acquisition cost so that we can come with a number and try to drive that number down. That's one measurement.

Speaker 2: 21:26

The customer lifetime value Once we have a customer, it's easier to keep them and resell to them than it is to find a new customer.

Speaker 2: 21:33

So we want to get an idea about how much does that customer cost us or revenue we're generating from them per year and keep them along as long as possible. The conversion rate Obviously we want a high conversion rate. We want for each person that we're doing a marketing campaign with to be in a position that we can now convert more of them, because we've had a great plan that tells us the details, that gets the results back from the sales team so that we can convert them more often. Then, obviously, as you said this is where the similarities between the two come in is the return on the investment. With all these measurements in place, are we actually making money from this endeavor? There's a lot of different things in terms of engagement rates, open rates, click rates and things like that that goes into the engagement of the campaign we're putting out. Going back to a previous episode again, marketing is more about a relationship than it is about hardcore sales. In your case, it's more about the direct sales.

Speaker 3: 22:32

So, craig, along those lines, do you want to kind of go into what are some of the key performance and you started to touch on it a little bit, but what some of the key performance indicators are, both maybe from a front end and from a back end, in terms of what folks should be looking for out of their marketing efforts?

Speaker 2: 22:46

Sure. So from a marketing efforts, they should be looking at the type of things, whether it be the phone ringing from a marketing perspective. They should be looking at the email form fills that comes in. They should be looking at the average increasing of the number of traffic that come to your website, for example. Those are indicators that the process is working. And the thing to remember about a marketing perspective is nothing is a grand slam's happened, but it's never a direct grand slam. So for people who actually come to your site, that's a win. But can you get them to return on a regular basis Now, depending on this product or the service that you're selling, you can be in a position that they may not need the service now, but they might be a great client for you later to keep that pipeline full for you. Those are some good measurement pieces for you in terms of marketing perspectives.

Speaker 3: 23:40

Excellent and from the sales perspective, with the key performance indicators, I kind of break them into two categories Leading indicators, which are the front end behaviors that are going to lead to the lagging indicators, which are the results that you see. So different leading indicators that's typically the activities that are being done on the front end to try to get qualified opportunities, get qualified meetings. So for a lot of the things that my clients are looking at, they are looking at things like dials. They are looking at things like number of email sent, number of LinkedIn messages sent, number of networking events that they're going to. Other leading indicators that come as a result of that is how many conversations are they having? Of those conversations, how many conversations are converting into initial first meetings, into initial first calls? And then the lagging indicators are the result of those how many first meetings, what percentage of first meetings turn into qualified opportunities? From the qualified opportunities, how many of them are actually closing into business? So we need to be tracking doing the right activity on the front end with getting the results on the back end.

Speaker 3: 24:56

Oftentimes when I talk to clients they're a little confused. Things were going really well for a while and then results dip. And whenever results dip, I always go back and look at the previous behavior and find that the trap that sometimes people get into salespeople get into is they'll do a lot of front end activity, which then will lead to a lot of qualified meetings, and what happens is they stop having doing that front end activity. They see all of those qualified meetings through the funnel and then they go oh my God, there's nothing in the funnel and they need to start all over again. So the real people who are real killers, people who are just incredible at sales, are able to balance continuing to do those front end leading indicator activities even when they're really, really busy, so that that pipeline never gets empty and they're constantly having a flow of good opportunities coming in.

Speaker 2: 25:55

And actually, to that point, one of the things that happens to us from a marketing perspective, especially as an outsourced marketing company, is, when they get that good feeling that the marketing is working and the leads and so forth are starting to come, they go we don't need you guys now anymore. We have leads coming, and then that dip happens, which is inevitable to happen, and then they go. Oh yeah, by the way, it ain't working anymore. So there again is another similarity as to how the two sides work together.

Speaker 3: 26:23

I thought I was the only one. I've been fired by a number of clients because I did my job too well and they got too busy and there were just too many sales coming in. And then they forget to continue to keep their eye on the ball and continue to do the prospecting activity. They don't have people holding them accountable and they see all of those leads through. They had a killer year and then about eight, nine months later I get a call hey, we're not quite sure what happened. Can you come back in Somehow? Things fell off.

Speaker 3: 26:55

So again, when we get successful, the key is to continue doing those things that made you successful and not to stop and just strictly service. And again, I find that a lot of for me, a lot of clients I've worked with were their client service intensive, heavy, heavy. So construction engineers, architects, they get really, really busy. Software companies they get really, really busy on a couple of projects, forget about all of the prospecting. And then it's oh my God, what happens now, because once they get through and finish those projects, they're going to be really busy. They have to start all over again. So having that balance is really key.

Speaker 2: 27:36

And it's even worse for seasonal companies, right. So during the off season they go through the process of prospecting and marketing and pushing really hard in preparation for their work season, and then they get to the work and totally forget about the prospecting side as well. You know, I think one of the other points that we were going to talk about here is one our industries are not set and forget it. I want to be clear about that. We're not in the set and forget it industry. It's a constant moving thing, even in slow seasons.

Speaker 2: 28:07

And two re-nurturing the leaves that aren't exactly ready to buy now. Right, and I know that's something that's going that you'd like to talk about a lot, but whenever there's never really a bad lead, it's just a bad timing or it's a bad information that was delivered. So either one of those is kind of the fail quick logic, but you want to re-nurture those leads because they are still people that you've already spent money on to get them to your door or to get them to your website or get them to your storefront, whatever that might be. You want to hold on to them because that's great data in terms of where you've made mistakes before or where they're the ideal customer. How does that apply into your space?

Speaker 3: 28:48

It applies really well into my space. Sometimes my clients take me to literally and when I tell them to disqualify a prospect, somehow on their head that means okay, well, if they're not ready now, that means I'm never, ever, ever going to talk to them again. Typically, in an ideal world, when folks are disqualifying prospects, that means that they're no longer spending their active time proactively calling and emailing and doing those kinds of things. But that's when it's great to have a really good marketing function within your organization to put them on a drip campaign, especially if you have content to provide. We want to keep top of mind, we want to keep in front of them without the sales person having to proactively do a lot to reach out and get in front of them.

Speaker 3: 29:33

So again, when we say disqualify, again that means it's not a good fit right now Doesn't mean that they're not going to come back to you or it may not be a good fit down the road. So again, it's really key to make sure that sales is engaging with marketing, to make sure that there is some kind of nurture campaign, some kind of drip campaign. So we're staying in front of that person, we're staying top of mind. So if circumstances change. They know to get back in touch with us when it may be right for another opportunity or again if they're good potential opportunities. As the person in sales, we're not going to follow up every week moving forward, but that doesn't mean that six months from now we don't put a reminder in to check back in with the prospect to see if things haven't changed.

Speaker 2: 30:18

And you hit right up on that, all the marketing stuff here again, supporting the fact that I understand when people say sales in marketing. But we're not going to let you guys get off the hook that easy. We're just not going to do it. Sales in marketing are different disciplines, but they have similarities. And here Evan is a great example of how to create a sales plan, how to create a marketing plan. They have similarities. A lot of the terms might be different, but they are different disciplines. Is there anything else you want to tell everybody before we take off today, evan?

Speaker 3: 30:48

I just like to thank everybody for tuning in In future episodes, some of the things that we're going to be talking about again best practices when it comes to sales and marketing, biggest mistakes. We're going to talk about everything from targeting your ideal prospects to differentiating yourself from the competition to the customer journey, to a special episode for selling professionals who don't normally sell those accountants, architects, engineers, attorneys we're going to have something just for you.

Speaker 2: 31:19

And I'm Craig Andrews and this is Evan Poland, and I just want to remind you guys. Go to our YouTube channel, go to our Facebook, go to our Twitter, go to our Instagram, go to all of them, subscribe. If you have a question, reach out to Evan or myself. We both are on LinkedIn. We both are in those platforms, so if you have any questions that you want us to address, that you want us to answer, that you're confused about that you might need some feedback on let us know. Again, craig Andrews and Evan Poland, and we will see you guys next time.

Speaker 1: 32:19

Keep hustling and keep winning.