Strategic Planning: Marketing & Sales

This week in our strategic planning series, we’re focusing on marketing and sales. This is often an area that we give little attention to. We generally focus on providing an excellent product or service – and we should. But if we don’t let people know how our excellent product or service will enhance their life, and why we’re the best choice for that product or service, we will likely not experience the type of growth we want.

MARKETING

Marketing can be thought of as all activities a business carries out to:

• Identify its target market
• Prepare promotional material designed to appeal to ideal client
• Communicate the material in a cost-effective manner
• Distribute the product or service to the target market

To be effective at marketing, you should be doing each of these four activities. If you have a great product or service but communicate it to the wrong market segment, the marketing won’t be effective. If you have great marketing material, but don’t deliver on what you’re advertising, the marketing won’t be effective. So be sure to include each of these four parts in your marketing.

The basis of any marketing plan is understanding the 4 P’s of Marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion

Product: or “service”, in the case of the majority of landscape work;

Place: not only means the physical space where the company is located, but in service companies, it includes the way your company offers its service. For example, going to a residence to do a landscape design is how your service is delivered.

Price: such as bid pricing or fees charged for work carried out

Promotion: such as paid or unpaid advertising.

These 4 P’s should be clearly defined and understood as they apply to your company and put down on paper as part of a marketing plan.

To develop successful marketing and sales strategies, it’s very helpful to have a good understanding of consumer behavior and how customers go through the decision-making process. The chart below (from CNLA) identifies rational and emotional reasons people purchase products or services.

Pricing Strategies

When it comes to pricing strategies, consider supply and demand. The lower the supply, the higher the price. And the lower the demand, the lower the price.

When setting your pricing, be sure to include the costs of labour, materials, equipment, subcontractors, overhead, contingencies and profit. To ensure your business is profitable and continues to grow, build your estimates from a budget and the actual cost of doing business, rather than what other businesses are charging or what the client stipulates it needs to be. The best book we’ve found for helping with estimating and pricing is J. Paul Lamarche’s What the Market Will “Bare”. We recently had Jacki Hart write a review of this book. You can find that review HERE.

PROMOTION

Promotion is all the activities involved in the communication of your business’s product and services to consumers, thereby convincing them to buy from your company.

Advertising is the process of informing potential customers about your products and services and why they should deal with you instead of with someone else. When it comes to advertising, there are so many ways to advertise:

• word of mouth
• repeat customers
• current customers
• door hangers
• on-line marketing
• website
• magazines
• signage
• relationships
• trade shows

Regardless of what mediums you use for advertising, it will be wasted money if you don’t evaluate its effectiveness. In order to do this, identify your target market for your advertising and ask or track where leads are coming from.

There are some fantastic books on marketing and sales. Here are a few of our favourites:

•  Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller
• The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
• This is Marketing by Seth Godin
• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson
• People Buy You by Jeb Blount

This has been a very, very brief overview of marketing and sales. Grant will be doing a whole presentation on this topic at the LO Waterloo Chapter meeting on Wednesday, November 6. The event is free to attend, and we’d love to see you there. For more information, click HERE.