What Everyone in Sales Needs to Know About Marketing

I get it, there’s some natural friction between sales and marketing.

It’s okay, though. It’s a healthy form of competition, a symbiotic relationship keeping both sides sharp.

But if you’re in sales and you don’t know your marketing basics, you’re selling yourself short.

One of the things I owe my success to is the 8 or 9 years I spent in marketing before migrating over to sales. Understanding the fundamentals of marketing made my sales career.

And my guest today, Wayne Mullins, is all about marketing fundamentals. As the founder of Ugly Mug Marketing, Wayne really focuses on the basics.

See, too many people get wrapped up in the latest shiny sales or marketing gimmick and, in the process, forget the simple fundamentals we all know work.

So, let’s get back to basics with Wayne.

Wayne goes over:

• The definition of marketing
• The natural progression of sales and marketing
• The two questions everyone in sales and marketing should ask themselves every day

What is marketing, anyway?

See, I told you we’d be getting back to basics. But before you laugh, how do you define marketing?

Chances are, you just made it more complicated than it needs to be.

Wayne defines marketing as simply: Your ability to attract and keep a customer.

“Marketing is your ability to attract and to keep a customer. It’s a very simple definition. But that simplicity is so profound.”

WAYNE MULLINS at Ugly Mug Marketing

Easy, right?

The problem is, most people confuse marketing and advertising. People think they’re synonymous. But the reality is, advertising is just a small component on the attracting side of marketing.

But you need to embrace both sides. Attracting and keeping a customer.

When you do that, it transforms every other aspect of what you do.

The natural progression

So, now we’ve got the definition out of the way, let’s move on to the fundamental structure of how sales and marketing intertwine: the natural progression.

Yeah, it sounds fancy, but it’s also pretty easy to wrap your head around.

Wayne looks at it like this:

Strangers and friends

Picture a clock. At 12 o’clock, you have strangers. No, this isn’t the title of my noir detective series.

Strangers are all the people out there in the marketplace you believe could be a good fit for your product or service. You don’t know them yet, but you want to move them to the 3 o’clock position.

That’s where friends live. But to turn a stranger into a friend you need two things to happen: They obviously need to know you exist and, more importantly, they need to like you.

So, they could hate your product, they could hate your service or they could hate you. If any of those are true, they just aren’t friend-material. That’s okay, it just means they aren’t a good fit.

Customers and Evangelists

At the 6 o’clock spot, we have customers. And, just in case you didn’t know, customers are friends who open their wallets. That’s what all salespeople and all marketers are after.

To create a customer out of a friend, they need to understand the value in what you’re offering outweighs the contents of their wallet. And the only way they’ll believe that is to trust you.

“It’s the natural progression. Because, in terms of selling and psychology, those three elements are absolutely true. We have to know, like and trust to make that transaction take place.”

WAYNE MULLINS at Ugly Mug Marketing

All of these are fundamentals we should all know, right? But at around 9 o’clock, a lot of us start to get sleepy.

At 9 o’clock is where we have evangelists. Evangelists are the customers who tell their friends, coworkers, dentists and neighborhood gossips about how awesome you are and convince them that opening their wallets is a great idea.

Evangelists are awesome, they make friends and customers for you without you needing to do a whole lot of extra work.

The problem is, a lot of salespeople seem to think 6 o’clock is where the natural progression ends.

The two questions you need to ask yourself every day

We should all know how important evangelists are. And a lot of us think we do. But it’s easy to think we’ve won and we’re done once we’ve turned a friend into a customer.

If you’re serious about driving results, though, you need to ask yourself two questions every day:

• What did I do today to attract a customer?
• What did I do to keep a customer?

Again, we’re keeping it simple. You may think this is just common sense but, if you’re being honest with yourself, how often do you let one or the other slide?

By being very intentional and making a conscious effort to ask those questions every day, you keep them front and center.

Write them down and ask yourself — you’ll be surprised how often you’ll catch yourself slipping.

Usually, we’re on the second question. But keeping a customer is how you make evangelists. And like we’ve already said, evangelists are awesome.

“Those who understand and embrace the power of creating evangelists are the ones who are going to succeed in this confusing and ever-changing marketplace.”

WAYNE MULLINS at Ugly Mug Marketing

Simple questions like these are what fosters our intentionality and keep us focused on what we need to do to perform.

We need to get back to basics — not magic bullets, fundamentals.

This blogpost includes highlights of our podcast interview with Wayne Mullins, founder of Ugly Mug Marketing.

For the entire interview, you can listen to The B2B Revenue Executive Experience.

If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, we suggest this link.