Let’s do a little imagination exercise. Let’s pretend you’re in the market for a new car. You go down to the auto dealership, and instead of going into the showroom to talk to a sales representative, you go into the dealership service department and just order every single part that goes into the model of car you want.
Is that how we buy automobiles? Seems a little absurd, huh?
A few days later, a big truck pulls up out in front of your house and drops off all these crates full of the parts you bought.
Now, is that big pile of parts on the ground a working automobile?
All the parts might be there in that pile, but they have to be assembled in a specific way to really operate as they were intended. Only when all of the parts are assembled and working together in sequence, do you actually have a drivable vehicle.
So, how do we go from a mixed up pile of parts to the finely tuned system that we call an automobile?
Do we start building the car by randomly pulling things out of the pile and bolting them together?
Do we grab a headlight, and connect it to a steering wheel?
WELL OF COURSE NOT!
Each part has a very specific job – an individual function or role that it performs.
When assembled together in sequence, all those individual parts can work together because the system is designed and developed according to an overall, master plan. It’s engineered! The manufacturer has a plan when they build that car - a set of specifications and activities!
And you would need that plan to build the same car out of your pile of parts, right?
Okay, let’s take what we’ve learned here and apply it to marketing and sales.
As silly as it would be to just start randomly bolting car parts together without a plan, that’s exactly how a lot of small business owners and managers approach their marketing and sales, every single day. Pieces and parts are just randomly bolted together without any plan or reasoning.
"Here… let’s make a new brochure..."
"Maybe we need a new logo..."
"Our website needs something..."
"Let’s run an ad in this magazine..."
And so on and so on… It’s a bit dramatic, but it’s the truth.
Furthermore, trying to back your way into a complete marketing process from social media or some other lead generation technique is like trying to design an entire automobile around the specifications of the headlight. It's simply not going to work because the foundation is based upon the wrong perspective.
Unfortunately, the current trend is focused on the techniques at the tactical level, or in the automotive example, the headlight. There's little to no attention given to the strategic-level business process of marketing and sales as a complete, end-to-end system of producing leads, prospects, and customers.