Selling the sizzle, not the sausage

Countless owner-managers and decision-takers in SMEs and professional practices have no real grasp of marketing. They know they should be doing something but have no real knowledge about what to do or how to use it to improve their businesses, says marketing recruitment specialist Jenny Cainer.

Entrepreneurs tend to be experts in their chosen field but also need to acquire a range of other skills to run a business successfully. Those with responsibility for running any independent businesses or professional firm certainly need an understanding of administration, health and safety, finance and employment law.

Running any business also requires a working knowledge of such things as the director’s or partner’s statutory obligations, personnel management, trade union rights and pensions.

It’s generally accepted that this bundle of acquired knowledge and skills, plus some degree of natural ambition and business ability, can be sufficient to run a modest organisation if supplemented by training and guidance from external advisors and consultants from time to time.

True. But all too often, the key discipline of marketing is not seen as an essential prerequisite of success.

It’s only selling?

Businesspeople instinctively understand that new business is critical to success and growth but many are nonetheless content to leave the generation and conversion of sales leads to a mixture of chance, footfall, recommendation, networking and occasional forays into advertising - usually driven by the efforts of ambitious advertising sales reps.

When asked to define ’marketing’ they are likely to describe it as ’to do with selling, generating sales and promoting your business to new customers or clients’.

They’re right, of course. But formulating a marketing strategy, no matter what the size of the company or budget, can achieve so much more than a loosely defined ’promotion’. For example, the right mix of marketing initiatives can facilitate demand from the right type of customers, open doors for sales people and even create recognition and perceived value that enables a company to sell at higher prices or avoid discounting.

Firing-off the occasional sales letter and sticking an advert in the local newspaper or trade journal when the order book looks a bit thin can often be more expensive and be far less productive than a considered campaign.

Weapons

While the SMEs are dithering over the necessity of occasional ’speculative’ marketing expenditure, their corporate counterparts are relentlessly devoting a sizeable percentage of gross income to deploying an arsenal of marketing resources to advance their businesses.

Many organisations assign at least 10% of a product’s turnover to marketing, although in excess of 60% is often required to launch a new innovation where consumers need to be educated prior to purchase.

The experienced marketing executive has all sorts of ammunition to hand, with research into potential markets and product development at one end of the scale and methods of closing a sale at the other.

The dozen or so other weapons up his sleeve include branding, design, packaging, customer relationship management, affiliate schemes, online marketing, direct mail, press relations, tele-canvassing, broadcast advertising, etc, etc. How many of them do most small business people really understand?

Not enough because over the past few decades, marketing has gone from being the prerogative of the global multinationals to an imperative for everyone in every business of every kind.

Token recognition?

Small firms and companies know they need to be marketed but have unfortunately shown a tendency to appoint or promote inexperienced people - perhaps those with only an administrative or sales background - to marketing responsibility. Such token recognition of marketing’s importance is an ill-advised and costly gesture, a recipe for inaction, contraction or stagnation.

It’s crucial that the marketing effort is fully supported by whoever controls the business and that it’s management and funding is consistent with the importance the organisation places on its health and growth.

Not least of the criteria should be an honest mechanism for measuring the contribution the marketing effort has made to the increased size, competitiveness or profitability of the enterprise. There’s always a queue of people ready to take the credit for higher growth and profitability. Commissioned sales people and fee-earners in particular find it all too easy to give other reasons to explain the gains actually attributable to positive marketing.

These days, marketing is not an elective optional overhead, it’s an operational necessity for any business that wants to survive, grow and prosper. Getting properly qualified and experienced people to make this happen is an inescapable business obligation.

The principals of being proud of a company or partnership and the quality of its products or service is simply not enough to make it grow and flourish.

Its core offer must be professionally communicated to its marketplace.

Jenny Cainer is a founding partner of recruitment company Marketing Professionals, which specialises in placing marketing people at businesses from all sectors across the UK. She is an approved consultant to Business Link and trains entrepreneurs for the CBE. She can be contacted on 0161 236 6789.