Do I Have a Sales or a Marketing Problem?
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Brooke Greening: You cannot market your way to your sales goals, nor can you sell your way out of bad marketing. You have to have them both.
You have to have both marketing and sales going for you. So in marketing, that's one to many. That is the clearest way to say it, one to many. So we're talking like when we're doing email campaigns, when we're doing our website, when we're doing SEO, when we have ads going on, when we're doing webinars, like the list goes on and on and on and on.
If you have lots of leads that are coming and they love what you do, but they can't pay for it, that's a marketing issue. If you have people who can absolute, you're targeting people who can absolutely pay for it, but they have no desire for it, they don't want it, that is a marketing issue.
If your sales process takes a really long time, months and months and months and months, and it doesn't have to, we have a sales problem.
Scott Greening: Welcome to another episode of Sippin' Matcha and Helping You Make More Sales. I'm your host, Scott, and we'll bring Brooke, our sales trainer, coach, consultant, and matcha drinker in just a moment. As always, we invite you to jump into the conversation by sharing your anonymous sales questions. We won't out who you are at buildingmomentum.info/matcha.
So let's bring Brooke in and get to today's question after we, we check, we are batching some of these episodes so you can see she's about halfway done. With her ginormous cup of matcha. Say if you're watching on YouTube she's halfway there and that she is going after it. How's the matcha?
Brooke Greening: Yes.
Oh, it's so good. Thank you so much, Scott. We say it looks like maybe I'm acting like, oh, I don't think I could ever drink this big cup. Oh, trust me, I can.
Scott Greening: Yes, and I do have some surprise bad news for you. We what? We got communication from a listener that there is now a, evidently there was a typhoon or a hurricane or weather or something that is disrupting.
Oh no, the matcha harvest. So the global matcha crisis continues.
Brooke Greening: I am very sad for the matcha. That's very sad, but I do hope everybody's okay. That's a serious thing. I'm sorry to hear that.
Scott Greening: All right, so let's talk about our question for today. Mm-hmm. And this question comes because I've heard people describe you as
well, maybe I can't, as.
Maybe I can't share all of the things that I've heard people describe you as amazing, loving, such a great wife, a fantastic mother. Thank you.
Brooke Greening: All right. All right, go ahead. All right. We know there are other things, right?
Scott Greening: But a little bit of a unicorn because you have your feet into two worlds. So you are a certified StoryBrand marketing guide.
You actually help onboard and train new guides with StoryBrand. They've asked you to do that, but then you're also, and like your superpower is that you are a sales trainer, sales coach guru. That helps people know how to have great sales conversations. So you get today's question.
It comes up a fair amount of times, and it's this, it does, do I have a sales or a marketing problem? Do I have a sales or a marketing problem?
Brooke Greening: Yes, and I wanna encourage, in any business, we usually lean towards one or the other. Now it is possible to have both a sales and marketing issue like a big one.
And that's really unfortunate because that means things are not going well at all. But usually it's one or the other. What happens though? Is that people start to mix up the roles of sales and marketing and they start trying to solve the wrong problem. And that can cause a lot of confusion. It can cause chaos.
It, and it's just incredibly frustrating as a business owner when you're trying and trying and trying, but yet it's just not picking up the momentum that you want. So that's the first question. Do I have a sales or do I have a marketing problem? So. The very first thing that we wanna be able to do is when we recognize you need to have both.
So this is what I tell people on a regular basis. You cannot market your way to your sales goals, nor can you work your way out of, nor can you sell your way out of bad marketing. You have to have them both. They both need to be able to work for you. You can't have one and be able to survive. You have to have both marketing and sales.
But you have to know the difference between them so we can start to figure out what the problem is.
Scott Greening: Yeah, and we're talking like we're talking service, providing type of business. We're talking about businesses where you have to have a sales conversation to, to sell your product. There are some direct to consumer, like buy a widget on a website that basically it's a marketing, you get your landing page, you get everything set up the right way, and then you, yeah, then you can sell, but.
When you're having to talk to people you can't give it to me one more time. You can't market your,
Brooke Greening: you can't market your way to your sales goals, okay? Nor can you sell your way out of poor marketing.
Scott Greening: Alright? So let's dig into that a little bit more. What?
Brooke Greening: Yeah,
Scott Greening: I'm, and
Brooke Greening: I appreciate you. Go ahead.
Scott Greening: I'm clueless.
Help me know, like, okay. I thought like marketing and sales were the same thing. Like, what are we even talking about?
Brooke Greening: No you're not. And I, so I was just speaking at a conference at Sewell. I was speaking at another conference in Florida in June. I spoke at a conference actually for StoryBrand last year.
And I bring this up on a regular basis. And every time I bring up the slide in regards to what is marketing, what is sales, everybody brings their phone up. They start taking pictures and these are people who are in marketing and sales. So it's not being clueless, it's just being reminded. 'cause so many, some, so many times we sometimes forget.
So it's just nice to have like clear definitions so then we can figure out where we need to go. So the first thing. Marketing, and I appreciate you making that little caveat, Scott. I'm not talking to every sales, like every business in the world right now. I'm talking, when we're talking about that service-based industry, we're needing to have sales conversations.
These are the people we're talking about. You have to have both marketing and sales going for you. So in marketing, that's one to many. That is the clearest way to say it, one to many. So we're talking like when we're doing email campaigns, when we're doing our website, when we're doing SEO, when we have ads going on, when we're doing webinars, like the list goes on and on and on and on.
So you have one, one person talking to many, many people in sales. When I'm talking about those sales activities, it's one to one. So we may be doing emails, but it's directly to one person. We may be having conversations, it's directly to one person. We may be sending proposals out. It's directly to one person.
We are asking for the sale to one person. You have to have both of those activities going on and moving well. In order to be successful.
Scott Greening: Yeah. And that one-to-one could also be like one sales person talking to one company or one organization that has two or three people involved in the sales deciding process or the decision making process.
Brooke Greening: Yes. But the distinction is, you know all the people you're talking to, right? So whether it's one person or two, or three or four, or the board, like, you know, the people that it's going to and marketing, you do not know.
Scott Greening: Right,
Brooke Greening: you are, you're sending it out there.
Scott Greening: All right. So thank you for affirming that I'm not clueless.
Brooke Greening: You're not clueless. I'll
Scott Greening: add to the list of nice things that people say about you.
Brooke Greening: Thank you.
Scott Greening: So where do we go from there then? What's the danger of that? You said words like confusion and chaos. Like where what's the big deal?
Brooke Greening: Yeah, so let's talk about for a minute.
How do we know it's a marketing problem? Here's another quick, clear example. So we talk about qualified leads. We talk about people who want what we have. And they can pay for it. They can afford it. That is a great qualified lead. Hey, Brooke, I love what you're doing and I can afford it.
Great that is a qualified lead. If you have lots of leads that are coming and they love what you do, but they can't pay for it, that's a marketing issue. If you have people who can absolute, you're targeting people who can absolutely pay for it, but they have no desire for it, they don't want it, that is a marketing issue.
You have to start figuring out, okay, if I have tons and tons and tons and tons of leads. But they're not actually qualified. We are hitting a marketing issue at that point.
Scott Greening: And I was gonna also say, the other really obvious possibility is if you don't have very many leads at all, you, you have a, have a bit of a marketing problem.
Brooke Greening: Mm-hmm. That is a great point. If you are really struggling to get leads, that is a marketing problem.
Scott Greening: All right, so, yep. That's kind of the, some of the chaos and the frustration that can happen on the marketing side. What does that look like on the sales side?
Brooke Greening: So on the sales side, if you have the qualified leads, then if you have to have a lot of those qualified leads, we have a sales problem.
If your sales process takes a really long time, months and months and months and months, and it doesn't have to, we have a sales problem. Those, or if you are talking to people and then you never hear back from them. And you're like, well, they said send a proposal, or whatever the case is, and then it's just, it feels like ghost town.
That, and that's happening over and over and over again. That wasn't just like once in a blue moon you have a sales problem.
Scott Greening: All right. So we've kind of given the groundwork there of like how I know if I have a sales or a marketing problem. Mm-hmm. Where do we go from there? What do we need to think about and what can contribute to making that problem even worse, I guess is maybe a better question.
Brooke Greening: Yes. So let's go back to marketing. If we have a marketing problem, if we are getting leads that don't wanna pay or can't pay, don't want what we have, those types of things, or you're not getting any leads at all, those are the types of problems we were saying. Many, many times it always goes down to, okay, if we're saying it's one to many, then what is the message that we are sending one to many?
What's happening in our messaging is our messaging, what we're saying, what we're asking them to do. Is it confusing? Is it all about you? Are we missing the pain points of what they're feeling? That's when we start looking at what's going on in your messaging of the marketing strategy. That is the very first piece.
It's the first piece, and it's like the foundational part of your marketing. If that is off, everything else is gonna come. Everything else is gonna fall off. 'cause it doesn't matter. 'cause then you have to just keep doing this over and over and over again and just amp up more and more money and ads and all of that.
So if your messaging is confusing. That's gonna be a problem. If your messaging is not resonating with the problems that they're currently facing, they're not going to be paying any attention. And that's where being certified in StoryBrand has helped us so much in regards to our business and then as we've helped others.
Scott Greening: Yeah. I was just gonna jump in and give the, since we're talking about it. You may not say it yourself directly, but if you say, oh, that sounds like that might be a problem that I have, Brooke, this is like what her she's really good at is to work on your messaging and to help you have a clear messaging that actually results in sales.
'cause she kind of brings in this sales aspect to it too. And so, mm-hmm. Feel free to reach out. So what how then do we like position? Or do we, did you want to follow up with the sales side again? On, on what to do there? Are we
Brooke Greening: Yeah. No. I'd love to follow up on the sales side because that.
That is my passion because we're, you're working so hard from the marketing perspective to be able to get the leads that you need. Once you have those leads, it's not the time to be winging it. It's not the time to not treat those as gold. And especially if we're talking, 'cause I say in regards to sales, like those are sales conversations.
Those are what we're starting. And then things happen after that, like emails, or we might do emails before, but the whole goal is to try to get to someone. To be able to talk to you, especially as we are having those higher ticket services and products that we wanna be able to offer. And so you cannot wing it.
So that is why we created the service framework to be able to help people to know how to have authentic, real conversations. And just as a fun backstory, it all came back from when I went through counseling. Went through, I got my master's in counseling, and then we started incorporating, okay, how this is how we talk to people in a counseling way to give them direction and hope and help them to move forward.
Why can't we do pieces like that in our sales conversations? And so we created the service framework. And so that's the very first piece you have to look at. You have to look at your sales conversation and say. Is this actually leading people to direction? Is it giving them hope? Is it leading them to be able to work with me or am I losing a lot of people because it's just getting lost in that first conversation that we're having?
Scott Greening: Thank you. Yeah that's really good. And I think when we talk about like how to position people and that for success, this goes into it, but then you also have to be realistic about. If you're don't have a lot of leads and you think, oh, I'll get a salesperson, oh yeah, that'll solve everything.
You have to realize if you're not giving qualified leads, that salesperson is gonna have to spend a lot of time and energy and effort to cultivate that. I guess a hundred
Brooke Greening: percent, no. And then also, 'cause we were just talking about this 'cause I was doing a conference a few weeks ago. I literally was talking about, okay, how do we prep you to be able to have a successful sales team?
What needs to be in place? And it goes back to both of these pieces. So one, if you don't have leads and you're expecting your sales rep to find them, that's tough. It is different to go get them as opposed to being able to talk to them when they come, if that's what you need. Okay. But like you have to know that it's gonna be an uphill battle.
And then two, it goes back to that marketing, if your offer is confusing, if the messaging is getting kind of foggy, vague people don't know what it is or in regards to your offer is like you're doing all these different offers all the time and there's nothing systematic for that sales representative to be able to sell.
All of that starts causing a lot of chaos. And so that's why these two have to be able to work together, but when they don't, that's when everything starts getting all wonky.
Scott Greening: All right, so as far as like our, today's question of do I have a sales or a marketing problem, I think we've got a good, clear answer.
If you don't have leads or you have. Leads that can't afford what they want it, but they can't afford it. Or they can't afford it, but they don't want it. They don't want it. Then you got a marketing problem. Yes.
If you have lots of leads that are qualified and that, but. It takes you a ton of them to make a sale, or it's taking you a really long time to make that sale, then you have a sales problem.
And then as we've kind of continued to explore this, there's all sorts of other issues and different things that come into play there. But that's, that's how you know the answer to the question.
Brooke Greening: Absolutely. So then you can make a wise decision in what you wanna be able to do next with your business.
Scott Greening: Great. Well, thanks Brooke, and it's been a good conversation. I hope this is helpful for people, if you've found it helpful and that you can give us a, like, you can subscribe, you can follow, you can comment, you can share, you can do all of those things. And of course, Brooke is always available for you to reach out if you've got more specific questions and how she might be able to help you or the company that you're connected with.
Brooke Greening: Bye-bye.
