The Myth of Marketing Best Practices

I was having coffee this morning with a friend of mine who’s a sales enablement expert, and we were talking about how both in sales and marketing in companies, it’s so common for businesses to see something that worked somewhere else, another business, previously in their career, and assume that they can just apply that in their environment today, and they’re gonna get that same result. It doesn’t work that way. The reality is, best practices are practices. They come after you decide your strategy and know who it is and how it is that you are gonna deliver your value in your market. Those dynamics about your market and your opportunity, define what could work for you. Here are three things you need to know about your business before you can choose your practices and see if they are best practices for you. 

Who
First, who do you serve? Who does your business serve? Marketing tactics that work are totally different. If you are an enterprise, if your prospect is an enterprise, if your prospect is a consumer, if your prospect is a small business, what industry they’re in and what it is that they’re dealing with. Who they are, what, how, what is it that they need and how can they hear it? So you have to know that before you can decide which tactics you’re gonna use.

What
Next, what is it that you’re offering to help them with the kind of tactics for marketing and sales, for that matter. That work if you are selling a service versus a product versus an experience and in different types of all those different entities totally changes the kind of marketing you need to do, and what will work to get that message to be heard.

How
And finally, how do you go to market? Are you working through distributors? Are you direct one-on-one, with depending on what you’re selling something that requires a face-to-face interaction in order for that commitment to be made? Or could it be an online, an e-commerce transaction? All those things really affect how your marketing choices are gonna work.

So I encourage you to start with core principles. Start first knowing the who, the how, and the what of your business. Before you start evaluating or using any tactics, any particular things, you won’t be able to choose a best practice until you know what the core principles are for your business.