For CEOs of SMBs Facing Marketing and Sales Challenges: Seeing is Believing

The day after one of the most heightened elections in Canada’s history, where the “underdog” came through to win the election and become our second-youngest Prime Minister, I felt it apropos to draw an analogy to CEOs and sales and marketing.

Canada had a need for change. We were calling out for change as many did in the U.S. before Obama was elected, and when it came time for our elections, the need was answered with a new direction and a different party.

When I recently read a study conducted by the BDC that said that one of the most challenging business functions for business leaders in Canada is Sales and Marketing Strategy, it validated my experience working with CEOs of SMBs: they have a need.

The study breaks down this sales and marketing challenge further into the following areas:

1. Increasing the number of customer prospects (58%)
2. Developing and executing a sales and marketing plan (54%)
3. Converting prospects into customers (52%)

There were other sales and marketing challenges including conducting market research, integrating or improving the use of social media and other digital channels, understanding the competitive market, and developing an online presence.

As a CEO myself, I know that most of us wear multiple hats and are responsible for many of our businesses’ key functions in addition to sales and marketing, including HR, operations and finance. When we know we need help in these areas, we hire accountants, Human Resources consultants, and business advisors. Why would sales and marketing be any different?

It spells out in this study that business leaders prefer to hire an external expert to help them to resolve their sales and marketing challenges, so why is it so difficult for a CEO to have faith and to trust a marketing expert promising them that they can help them with their marketing and sales challenges?

Ultimately, hiring an external provider will come down to a few key factors: their reputation, references, price – but the essential factor is whether as a CEO you feel you can trust this candidate – whether you believe they can deliver on their promises. Once you have that, you have a winner.

As a CEO, have you been approached by an external marketing agency? If you decided not to work with them, why not?

3 Steps to Laying the Foundation for Solid Market Research

I can’t think of another aspect of marketing where the expression ”you get out of it what you put in” could be truer.

If you’ve conducted market research for your business, whether through an online survey, a competitive analysis, or even a mailed customer survey, did you act on the results? Did you find the results helpful in moving your agenda forward?

I am always surprised to hear from business owners who have conducted some market research and thought the results were interesting and helpful, and they might even make a couple of actionable changes, but they seem pleased to have conducted the research and are onto the next business issue.

When I dig a little deeper with these business owners, I often find that many have used online tools like Survey Monkey, or similar, or simply created their own survey. While there is nothing wrong with using the online tools (in fact, sometimes they are exactly what you need), you need a solid research foundation or methodology before choosing a tool to distribute and often tabulate the results.

As a marketing expert with years of market research expertise, I can guarantee that your research will yield mediocre results if the methodology and strategy were not sound. Market research is not in itself a box to be checked off on the list of marketing tasks for the year. It is a step in an ongoing process to get to know your customers, the market, or solicit feedback on a new product or service.

I’ve outlined below a few key steps to help you determine if you need to conduct market research and how you can create the foundation for a research strategy. I encourage you to spend as much time as you can on each step. The success of your research depends on this solid foundation.

1. Identify an Issue

Before conducting any research you’ll need to identify any issues your business is facing. A good rule of thumb is that you might consider conducting market research when:

• A product or service is not selling as well as forecasted
• The business is losing market share to competitors
• Your are considering launching a new product or service, entering a new target market, or expanding geography (reach)

2. Determine Parameters

Although this step is time consuming, it outlines the full scope of the research. You’ll need to outline the who (all stakeholders), the where (geography), the what (issue), the why (issue), and the how (qualitative or quantitative).

3. Assess Value

When assessing the viability you’ll need to consider everything you’ve done in steps 1 and 2, and assess what the value is in conducting this survey vs. not conducting the survey. There must be a solid business case and tangible value to your business to justify conducting this research.

After these steps are completed, you’re ready to start creating the methodology, and reengineering the results you want into questions for the survey. Ideally, if it’s an online survey, each question will be weighted based on relevance to the issue identified. At this time, you’ll also need to assess the online survey tools available to determine if they can calculate the results (cross tab) in a way that will give you the type of results you want. For example, on online tool may tell you that 50% of those asked enjoy watching hockey, when what you wanted an answer like 50% of current male customers over 55 in Ontario enjoy watching hockey. The nuances of market research can be numerous, so I’d recommend consulting with a marketing agency that conducts market research.

As they say about good photography: “It’s never really about the camera”, so too in research – results that give you what you want to know, are not be generated from the online tool.

Are you considering conducting market research? Will you hire a professional to help you or conduct it yourself?