Random Tactics or a Strategy?

Show Notes

• Understand the importance of a strategy before implementing any tactics in your business.
• Only implement tactics that are relevant to the strategies you have in place.
• A tactic is the means used to get an objective or in other words, the thing you need to accomplish.
• A strategy is the overall campaign or plan for a business. It can also be described as a synergistically designed system of tactics, that together produce the end result.
• One piece of your overall campaign that is designed to produce profit in your business is considered a tactic.
• Consider how your different tactics work together to accomplish your overall business goals, and then identify where the holes are in your strategy.
• Your marketing strategy needs to work with your sales strategy. There should be a consistency in your message.
• A sales strategy might look like this:
  • A lead comes in and then the person is sent a text message through an automated system to give them the promised content.
  • Within 15 minutes of the received text message, contact the person to make sure they received the content and the possibly ask if they have consumed the content.
  • You may call them back the second day to see if they have watched the material. This is a follow-up call.
  • Send a text as a pre-call SMS, so they know who will be calling them and why.
  • Next, send an email to ask if they consumed the content with a link to set up an appointment in the email.
  • If the appointment has been set, then next share a demo of the product or service.
  • Ask questions to confirm they are ready to buy.
  • Transfer them to customer fulfillment team and the sale is done.
• This process may take several weeks.
• The marketing team may use direct mail to send a postcard or a book and then have the sales team follow-up.
• Ask yourself, “What is the strategy that is going to help produce the result I am after?”, then “What are the tactics I need within this business strategy to get this result?”
• Focus on your strategy first as a business owner, you identify what the strategies are you need to have in place.
• Find someone who is in your similar business and is willing to mentor or coach you in business strategies that have worked for them.
• Once you have a good business strategy then you can identify what tactics will work for you.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Hello, this is Trent Chapman. I'm filling in for Ryan Chapman the next few days here. I'm going to be sharing with you today something that's very important to understand as a business owner. The problem I see with a lot of small businesses especially is they don't know the difference between a strategy and a tactic and they spend their days chasing the Silver Bullet of the magic tactic that they hope will make their business profitable or make it grow.

The solution here is understanding the importance of a strategy before you ever Implement any tactics in your business, and identifying, is this tactic really going to move the needle, is it going to move me closer to my goal of making more profit? And then only implement tactics that you have found to be relevant and important to the strategy you put in place.

A lot of people have different definitions of what is a strategy, what does atactic. I want to share my definition and hopefully we can get on the same page what I'm talking about here. When I think of a tactic, tactics are the actual means used to get an objective. The [00:01:00] tactic is like the nitty-gritty, the thing I got to do.

The strategy is the overall campaign of the plan which involves operational patterns, activity decision making things that on the ground, have to be done with tactical execution. As a business owner, it's my job to create a strategy for my business. If I have employees, the employees job is to execute that strategy and execute the tactics that are needed to fulfill that strategy.

In business, a strategy is a synergistically designed system of tactics that, together, produce the end result or what we're looking for is profit, right? A tactic in your business would be something like Facebook marketing, for example, that's a marketing tactic.

What might be a good action in your business and an important part of your marketing strategy is just one piece of the overall campaign that's designed to produce profit your business. In your business, you might have a marketing strategy, you might have a sales strategy, a fulfillment strategy, and a billing strategy. [00:02:00] Together, those strategies produce profit. And the goal of your business, obviously, is to produce profit if you're in for-profit business.

Within your marketing strategy, you're going to use different tactics. These marketing tactics are going to work together in order to create an outcome, which is more leads.

Within the sales strategy, you're going to also have different sales tactics and together those sales tactics work synergistically to produce the desired result for that strategy, which is, more sales.

When you look at your business in this way and you see it as several different strategies, you're marketing, your sales, fulfillment, your billing, all working together, you can start identify where the holes are in your strategy. Identify, what are the tactics that I need in order to grow my business or what tactics should I be dropping removing that aren't producing the desired result that I want, and how do I make this strategy more synergistic? How do I make it work together better?

I've seen this [00:03:00] failure happen on different levels. I've even seen businesses where the business owner doesn't understand that their marketing strategy has to work with their sales strategy. What happens is they have a great marketing strategy strategy, great marketing message, but then when it comes to the sales strategy, it's a different message altogether, so prospects are coming in through one message that's not being translated to the sales department or the sales team and they're giving a different message.

You may think this only happens in big businesses, but I've seen it happen in small businesses as well. They focus on a great marketing strategy and they have great marketing tactics, but they don't convey the same message in their overall business strategy so that from marketing to sales there's that congruency in the message which makes it more likely that someone's going to buy the product or service offering.

Let me take a step back now and give you an example of a sales strategy and this is the one that we've used in our businesses. When we talk [00:04:00] about identifying the sales strategies, in my definition, it's the interaction between producing the lead when they enter my database until you become a buyer or make a buying decision, so that's the sales part of my business. From the lead coming in until they make a buying decision, that's the sales strategy anything that goes on in there.

Step 1 might be that a lead comes in and we send them a text message through the automated system to let them know, here's the video or here's the link to the download that we promised you.

I'll talk later on in another podcast episode about why we've used a text message instead of an email as a way to deliver content and the strategy behind that and why that's been so effective for our businesses. But let's just leave it at that for now.

Step one, we'll deliver the content we promised in marketing through an outbound text message to the prospect. Part of our marketing strategy is gathering or obtaining the [00:05:00] contacts information and getting a cell phone instead of just an email address, and we also get an email address that's used in the strategy I'm gonna talk about. But step one, delivering the text message.

Step 2, within 15 minutes of them coming as new lead during our business hours, we're going to attempt to phone call to try and make contact with that process. Making sure that they received the promised marketing asset, whether it be a video, a report, whatever may be, and just asking them some questions to make sure they got it and seeing where their level of interest is and begin to engage in conversation.

The goal there is to mostly just check in, make sure they received it, and if they have consumed the content already, if they've already looked through it or already watched the video, then you might set the appointment at that point in time. If not, we're gonna come back and say, give me a call the next day or two just to see how you're doing, if you have any questions about what you read or what you watched. That way we have a reason to call them back again.

Now, when we call them back in the second day, if we haven't set the appointment, we're going to be giving a [00:06:00] call to make sure that they've watched that material.

So step 3 is the follow-up call, make sure they actually consume the content we deliver.

Step 4, if we didn't answer either of these first two times, is we're going to send them another text two days after they came in as a new lead. If we haven't set an appointment, if we haven't talked to them yet, our goal of that text is to let them know that when we calling them.

This is a tactic we call pre-call SMS, so it goes out a few minutes before we make a phone call. That way they can identify the phone number that's calling them, who's calling them, what it's about and that's all the text messages we send them before we call them.

Step 5 would be to send them an email, and this is an email that's going to ask them if they've consumed the content and if they'd like to set an appointment with a link to set an appointment in the email with our team.

Step 6. Let's say that we've already set the appointment and in this step we're going to do a demo of the product or [00:07:00] service and ask them questions to identify if they're ready to make a buying decision.

Step 7, we'll confirm that they're ready to buy and collect the payment.

Step 8, transfer them to the customer fulfillment team and now it's done with sales, now it's on to fulfillment.

So that might be just, and this is not a detailed, step-by-step of all the the little tactics within there, but that's an overall strategy of how we'd go about taking a new lead and getting them make a buying decision through phone, text, an appointment, and email. Those different media's are used to actually get the person to move along to make a buying decision.

This process goes on for quite a while if they don't answer the phone the first three times and they're not responding. It's not like we're going to stop after the second or third contact attempt. This might go on for a few weeks as we're trying to verify they've consumed the content. We use other tactics as well, including direct mail that will send out automatically if we have a mailing address.

Some of [00:08:00] our strategies and sales would be the marketing team sends a book out. The book is delivered and the sales team is following up, make sure they got the book, they read it and ask them questions to get them engaged in conversation. So we might use direct mail, letters, postcards, greeting cards as follow-up as well to find out some into buying decision.

My explanation here of the sales strategy might seem like a lot if you're selling at $20 product online, but if you're selling a one to ten thousand dollar product or lifetime value of $5000 plus, this is not at all excessive. And in fact, you can go beyond the sales strategy.

The point I'm trying to make here is that you have to identify for your business, what is the strategy that's going to help me to produce the result? What are the tactics that I need within this business strategy in order to get the result? For marketing, I'm trying to get leads. How can I get more leads that are good qualified leads? For sales, my goal is, how can I get more of my leads to say yes to buying my [00:09:00] product or service?

For fulfillment, it's, how can I fulfill on these to the point where we don't have any chargebacks, cancellations, or people saying I'm not interested anymore, refund me my money? Fulfillments goal is to make sure that we have a good customer experience. And satisfied customers.

And billing, of course, to make sure that we're collecting payment and processing payments properly, whether it be a one-time thing, a recurring thing, and that's an additional strategy in and of itself.

So when you take this into consideration, at the end of the day, my goal for this this episode is for you to understand that when you focus on your strategy first as the business owner, you identify what are the strategies I need to have in place?

And if you don't have a good strategy yourself, you don't know what a good strategy is, find someone who's in your similar business and it's willing to share, a coach or mentor, somebody, or find people who teach strategies, not just tactics. Have them show you what is working in other businesses. Here's an example for someone similar to your business or similar to your business model, your price point, whatever it may be, and here's what they're [00:10:00] doing for marketing. Here's what they're doing for their sales strategy. Here's the overall business strategy. And once you have a good business strategy, then you can clearly identify what tactics are for you and which ones are not.

Otherwise, here's what happens. This happened to me all the time. I started my first business. I was doing a a business where I didn't understand anything about marketing sales. To me, it was like those words didn't mean anything. It was just like, I know I need to get people to buy something. That's what I understood.

So whenever someone came to me said hey, I got a sales tactic I want to teach you. I'm gonna charge you five thousand dollars, I'm going to teach you this sales tactic, it's going to revolutionize your business. That, to me, was not what I needed at the time. I spent the money because I didn't understand any different because I was buying a tactic instead of understanding I had no clue of how this tactic is going to work in my business, I first needed a strategy.

That tactic might have been valuable later on down the road, but right then that was not at all what I needed. But because I didn't understand strategy, and because I didn't have a strategy, I was easily taken by everything that was offered to me. [00:11:00] I was a buyer. I would buy anything put in front of me if I thought it would help me grow my business because I didn't know any different.

So I want you to focus on first identifying, what is your strategy for your overall business from beginning to end? How do you get people to go from a lead to paying you money? And then identify, what is the strategy for my marketing, for my sales, for my fulfillment, for my billing, whatever other aspect of your business.

You might have different flow of your business. But find out, what is the strategy that works for your business, and then you can make wise decisions about what tactics do I need, what tools or what people do I need in my business to help me to execute this strategy of this plan to produce profit.

I encourage you to find someone who can help you to identify strategies that's good for you, that works with your business and not just take whatever is being sold to you. This will help you to make better decisions in what tactics to implement in your business and what is your overall goal or [00:12:00] strategy for achieving profit and more growth in your business?

With that I will leave you this one last thing: focus on your strategy and the tactics will be identified easily when you have a clear strategy in your business. Good luck, and I hope you have success implementing your strategy in your business.