The Five Levels of Marketing

Over the years it has been helpful for some of our clients to have us organize their sales and marketing activities into a model.  Our model breaks down marketing into five distinct levels.  Once we complete this assessment we can suggest how to improve the levels a client is already engaged in and help them market on other levels that best support their growth. 

In this column we will present the Five Levels Model and provide some insight into where you might focus time and money based on your current objectives.

The Five Levels

1. Sales: Prospecting, qualifying, discovery, presentation, demonstration, proposal writing and closing
2. Information/Data/Analytics 
3. Tactical or Campaign 
4. Marketing or Program 
5. Vision/Strategic 

Some companies operate only on one level, some on two levels, and some on all five.  As an example, we have one client that simply had a sales function (Level One) and a vision of what they wanted to become (Level Five). In ten years they grew to $60 million in revenue before they marketed on any other levels. They didn’t use data to leverage their sales effort; they ran no tactical campaigns to focus on a targeted group for a limited amount of time to test a promotion or product idea. They didn’t have a marketing plan, but they grew steadily because what they did do they did well and did it consistently.  That included the delivery of their services and products as well as their limited marketing.

Another example is when we observe salespeople who spend all their time prospecting, and little or no time following up with meetings to strengthen the discovery part of their process.  We worked with one salesperson who was making 18 sales calls a day and selling nothing.  We cut him back to three calls a day and showed him how to make effective use of the additional time he now had.

A final example is the law firm that lost five major opportunities in a row. In each case, they were given two-hour presentation opportunities to compete for major pieces of new business, and they used their time to convey “why us.”  Over a few months we developed a process that was heavily weighted toward discovery (that is, learning the prospect’s issues), confirmation of the discovered intelligence, short sections for Q&A, and finally why us.  They won the next five opportunities, which were worth millions of dollars in business. 

Here is a way for you to begin thinking about where your business development team with respect to Level One:  If your current sales process is to show up and offer a solution with a canned pitch, you are at the low end of Level One.  Your process is educational—basically, “why us”—but probably not persuasive.  This process may work in a small consumer sale but will be far less effective in a complex business-to-business sale. 

Here are some specific signs that your selling skills and process are at the low end of Level One:

• Winning percentage for competitive opportunities is too low
• Too few first meetings
• Giving away too much intellectual property within the sales process
• Too much focus on price and terms
• Difficulty turning social situations into business opportunities with grace
• Low win rate on large, request for proposal opportunities.

Score yourself at the high end of Level One if your sales process is mostly built on prospect discovery and working that discovery into presentations, demonstrations, and proposals.  This approach goes way beyond identification of pain.  You have a customized process that becomes more customized for each prospect you meet with.

Here is another example of a successful company that is focused only on their sales and their vision.  It is a software as a service firm developed to create an operations dashboard to help professional firms better understand how their business is doing. 

The idea for the business came from the founder seeing a need for more and better information in her own profession.  She not only recognized that she lacked information to manage her company better, but at conferences she heard the same need being expressed by others. That led to the vision of creating a dashboard to leverage information hidden within the practice.

The founder put together a group to create a dashboard customized to meet her needs and the needs of the other professionals in her firm to better support clients. Once they had the product and a strong sales process it was much easier to make sales.  The company is only nine months old but is projecting a low seven-figure run rate by the end of the year.  Almost all of the business is now coming from referrals.

Takeaways:

• The fastest way to increase revenue in the short term is to improve the sales function on Level One.  This means stronger consultative selling skills, the development of custom sales processes, and good coaching.
• The most efficient way to obtain competitive advantage is to market one level above your competition. If they are marketing on three levels, you differentiate by marketing on four.
• The goal is to gain sustainable competitive advantage on all five levels and at the high end of each one.
• There are many ways to market successfully using the Five Levels Model. The first step is to identify which level you’re on now and how well you’re doing. Improve on that level and test other levels as it makes sense to find the best combination for your business.

In future columns we will discuss other firms that are marketing on different levels and how using the model has led to their success. 

To learn more about how the Five Levels can help your business grow, please contact me. I’m at pkrone@productivestrategies.com or 847-446-0008 Ext. 1.