In my career (version 1.0) I spent my days working on a variety of tasks associated with running a small B2B company. This included anything from working directly with the customers to painting the equipment because the painter didn’t show up (again!) and we had orders to ship. It was almost exclusively reactionary and it was fun at the time.
Today however, I am much more pro-active! I spend my time thinking about how small and medium-sized businesses, similar to mine, can retool and modernize their sales and marketing. It was during one of these thinking/writing sessions that I realized how the efforts put into modernizing sales can dramatically increase the value of a company. You might be thinking, “yes, of course - increased sales will make my company more valuable – that’s been true from the beginning of commerce.” However I am not talking about merely increasing sales here. I am talking about building a system and process that greatly increases the technical authority of your company in the market place and systematically produces ongoing sales.
Here is my logic.
Traditional sales and marketing involves using traditional tactics - like cold calling, direct mail, print advertising etc – all designed to attract customers. Most of these tactics rely on reaching a very broad target market in the hopes of catching a few who are active buyers right now.
It’s all “once and done.” After your mailer has been sent or your calling campaign executed, those calls and mailers have little to no residual value. Running sales and marketing in this way is an ongoing expense, and it’s becoming less effective and therefore more expensive, all the time.
A modern sales and marketing plan is also designed to attract customers and generate sales, thus building company value, but it does so while simultaneously building long-term tangible assets. It creates valuable intellectual property and distributes it via your website, both of which you own.
Every piece of useful information that you put on your website is available for your customers 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, AND it will continue to work for you (providing residual benefits) as long at the information is still relevant.
Each time you add a new piece of information the value increases, creating more assets working for you. As you build you this information/knowledge center, more and more people come to it, which in turn makes Google take notice, sending even more people to your site. Eventually you have 5 very valuable assets working for you:
Asset 1 A content library that your prospects and customers crave.
Asset 2 A website with many visits from the right kind of visitors.
Asset 3 A current database of actively engaged prospects and customers.
Asset 4 Tools and processes that turn visiting prospects into customers.
Asset 5 Quantifiable Reports that show how you are getting your customers.
These are real assets, some of which could be sold as stand alone assets if one was so inclined. However taken together they are an automated value-generating machine – and that’s powerful!
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