If there’s one chicken-and-egg conundrum that’s almost unique to entrepreneurs, the decision of how to prioritize sales and marketing activities has got to be the biggest.
Many of those starting a small or medium-sized business will initially be focused on getting a loan or finding the other necessary capital to get off the ground. As part of that process, the most successful entrepreneurs make sure to develop a comprehensive business plan that touches on sales, marketing, R&D and hiring.
There isn’t always an exact timeline of how those various activities will play out over the course of the SMB launching and beyond, however. As long as you’ve demonstrated you’ve thought through all the ingredients to make your company successful, investors might assume you’ll be smart enough to figure out when they need to happen.
Unless you break out the execution of your business plan into some kind of phased journey, though, you risk being pulled in too many directions at once. It’s not something most SMB owners can delay, because they aren’t able to hire a large staff at the outset.
You also have to bear mind that every facet of a business — from operations to HR to customer service — needs to be monitored in terms of its day-to-day performance. That means in addition to getting the work done, you’ll also require time to look at whatever data you’ve gathered to assess what’s going well and what has to change.
The temptation might be to default to whichever skills you used most prior to launching your own SMB. If you had worked in sales for someone else before, for instance, it might feel natural to go all-out on your sales strategy in the early days. If you worked in marketing, it’s probably more tempting to focus on building the brand, because that’s something you already know how to do well.
Here’s what you soon discover: it’s not about you and your skills. It’s about what your customers need to have the best possible experience.
Of course, there will always be some variation on the best way to prioritize marketing and sales, so let’s look at some of the options in more detail:
Option 1: Marketing first, sales second
Who’s going to buy from you until they know who you are, what you represent, and the kinds of products and services you’re offering? The right marketing strategy will lay the groundwork for a lot of what will follow in terms of sales.
By creating content that positions your brand and encourages people to sign up for your newsletter, you’ll start to have a clearer sense of your total addressable market, and possibly what kind of pricing or options your products and services should have.
Next, as you begin to advertise more aggressively online and seed the market through channels like social media, you’ll generate real demand. Orders might start to come in that immediately have to be fulfilled, which will help you figure out the number of reps you need to hire, or how your e-commerce capabilities will need to scale.
OptIon 2: Sales first, marketing second
Not every SMB starts off with a blank slate. Sometimes an entrepreneur will be inspired to launch their company because they already know someone who will almost certainly become their first customer.
Plenty of new firms have started out by getting some initial business from one or more levels of the Canadian government, for example. If you worked in an area like financial services, you might have an “in” with a bank who will get your company started with its first purchase.
When this kind of thing happens, you’ll want to be very hands-on with that first set of customer relationships. You’re not just selling — you’re learning about the kinds of terms and conditions your future customers will expect. You’re getting a sense of who might be on the buying committee. You’re seeing what the average deal length will be.
Once you’ve set up these first customers as anchors, you can turn your attention into replicating your success by developing a marketing strategy to get many more.
Option 3: Sales and marketing simultaneously
It might be nearly impossible to juggle sales and marketing at the same time in the early days of a startup were it not for one thing: the rise of digital technologies that can help with both areas.
With marketing automation, for example, you can remove much of the manual and time-consuming work involved in running your first campaigns, or managing content across a slew of different channels.
As that’s happening, any gold your marketing produces in terms of leads can go right into a CRM. That means you’ll be able to stay organized and on top of all the customer follow ups you need to do in order to close your first sales.
The best part of taking a digital-first approach is that both a CRM and marketing automation platforms were designed with analytics and reporting tasks in mind. Not only will you be able to handle both functions at once, but you’ll have enough time left over to measure your results.
Another advantage of tackling marketing and sales at the same time is you’ll likely be able to maintain a sense of cohesion as you hire more reps and expand your marketing team. The better these two functions work together, the faster your business will grow.
No matter how you look at it, sales and marketing are both top priorities for any SMB. You may decide it’s better to rank them in importance or take a two-for-one approach. The key is understanding the resources required, and how you can use automation so that you’ll still be able to think holistically about your overall growth strategy.
