Does marketing work?

Eureka! Lord knows, it took me long enough to work this out, but better late than never, eh? If businesses spend as little on their sales effort – by which I mean on training in particular – as they do on their marketing, then I’m not entirely surprised that they see marketing as an activity that doesn’t yield anything like the investment. For once, dear reader, you don’t need to take my word for it and pass it off as the usual, Moose-rant; I’ll warrant you’ve had experience of it yourself if you’ve ever picked up an unsolicited sales call.

I took a call recently from a courteous professional; this by a long way is the exception rather than the rule. But, for the budding telesales person, here are some tips if you or the powers-that-be are too tight to invest in proper training. Don’t read from a script, learn it: we on the other end of the line can tell the difference. I am not your mate; I have a name. Don’t pretend you are following up on a call we ‘had’ six months prior and that I was interested; I have a memory. Don’t tell me my website is rubbish; we build them ourselves and probably better than you. I can negotiate well, and consequently am happy with the deal from my existing telephone provider. I could go on, but there’s no need: I’m sure you get the drift.

So then, back to square one. There is as little point in investing in your marketing if you are going to entrust those leads to a rude, knuckle-scraping illiterate as there is in training your sales guys to a high level and then providing them with no leads whatsoever. Sales and marketing should be joined at the hip, and whilst one is useless without the other, if they are both done well, sales will surely follow.