June 17, 2025
In the past two months we’ve written about the Five Levels of Marketing—specifically about Level One: Sales and Level Two: Information / Data Gathering.
Now, we’ll discuss Level Three: Tactical Sales Campaigns, which is fun because it’s a payoff level. We use information learned on Level Two and leverage it with Level One sales activity. In other words, on Level Three we take action to build revenue based on the intelligence gathered on prior levels.
Here are the four main actions of a sales campaign:
As an example, suppose we’ve identified in Level Two medical device manufacturing as a fast growing, attractive market for our company.
Our first goal is to develop two million dollars in new business in the next two years in Texas, a state where we have very little penetration but a lot of potential. To do that we first bring our sales team into the state for a week. Each day we call on medical device firms taken from a list we developed as an asset during our work on Level Two. The sales team had access to the list a few weeks in advance so they could set up meetings with the target list.
Each morning we video conference with sales team members at work in different cities and discuss what we’ve learned the day before and what to keep on doing or what to try differently. Each afternoon during a second video conference, we debrief and discuss lessons learned that day, sharing successes and failures.
Our second goal is to generate enough business to justify hiring a full-time salesperson, or adding a manufacturer’s representative for the state. It is easier to hire good people if the territory is already softened up with some new business.
Our third campaign goal is to determine whether the week of selling in Texas has proven to be a successful approach. Then, if so, we decide whether to do it again in another state. If it is successful this one state focus might become part of the Level 4 marketing plan. We might try different states for medical devices, say Illinois; or we might try a different vertical market the next time, say home appliance manufacturers.
Remember, each of the five levels builds on prior levels. The key is to increase sales by beginning with the levels you’re already operating on. To gain competitive advantage begin marketing on higher levels than your competition. The goal is to gain sustainable long-term competitive advantage by marketing on all five levels.
As another example, a firm I worked for earlier in my career was a Tier One supplier to Ford, so the quality level was approved for automotive supply. One of our goals was to attract more Tier Two businesses with which we could achieve higher margins. Knowing that carburation was going to be replaced by fuel injection we also knew that new tooling would be required. Our opportunity was to become suppliers to firms that we didn’t currently supply—firms such as Holley, Lucas Cav, and Walbro.
We decided to target carburetor manufacturers both inside and outside of the automotive sector. Part of that campaign involved building a list of carburetor manufacturers, part of it involved building some sales support materials that helped us convey our differentiation from competition, including the fact that our quality program was already approved by Ford. We also had a products competitive advantage in tool life which would be valued by OEMs making high volume for fuel injection.
We called on each manufacturing company and shared our plan to become a major fuel injection parts supplier. We used consultative selling techniques and a strong sales discovery process to convey, first, that we were focusing on their market and, second, because our tooling lasted longer than our competition’s we could offer considerable cost savings over time. Every manufacturer that was making the transition from carburetion to fuel injection would have to retool, so tool life would become an important buying motive. Through discovery we were able to help the prospect calculate the potential savings from our tooling versus competition.
We ended up winning three of the four accounts we targeted. The campaign was a big success.
Finally, be sure to keep these Five-Level Model Marketing Takeaways in mind:
We have an extensive list of other types of data that can be used to market at the higher end of Level Three. Just get in touch if you want to discuss additional data points that can help drive revenue. We’re at
pkrone@productivestrategies.com and 847-446-0008 Ext. 1.
