If you’re taking a new job in sales or marketing, read this book first. It could save you leaving your job within three to six months!
I love the “bullseye framework” developed by Louis Gudema and explained in his book Bullseye Marketing—just out this week in its second (updated) edition.
If you are not interested in anything else, it’s critical to your career survival in any marketing or sales role, to understand the basic framework. Here is in its simplest form.
The Bullseye Framework
Step 1: Sell to your current clients.
Step 2: Sell to other people looking to buy right now.
Step 3: Sell to the rest of the people that fit your target audience.
If you remember those steps in order, you will probably have improved your tenure by an order of magnitude (geeky talk for 10 times.)
It’s really simple! But so many marketers and salespeople don’t do this and do not do it in the right order. We run off trying to tell the world how great our product is and forget to sell to our clients (and our past clients.)
We make our job much (much) harder. And while we struggle slogging through going out cold to the world, our boss asks, “Where’s the revenue?” That’s when our stay at the new gig starts to wind down…
Know thy customer
The next concept in the book is another well-understood and usually messed up one: understand your customer. We all know this is important but so many of us go out really “not getting it” from our customer’s point of view. Everything you do as a sales or marketing executive is going to miss, if you don’t understand your customers thoroughly.
Figure out what to say
After you know your customers well, you can figure out what to say to them that actually matters to them (not to you!) What is it that your product does that is going to make their life better? Figure this out and then you can expand it to fit all the emails, web pages and ebooks you ever need.
Step 2: Figure out who wants to buy now
In the book Louis suggests using Google Pay-Per-Click ads to find out who is in the market for your product. If you’re in sales, see your marketing team for that. Another source of information on who is buying now is third-party intent data, sales teams can buy this kind of thing from companies like 6Sense. With this data you can see what companies are searching for products like yours now and you can launch an account-based campaign on those accounts.
Step 3: Everyone else
Please don’t do any of this until you’ve thoroughly worked step 1 and 2. In the book Louis describes a robust list of marketing tactics you can use to grow your brand’s awareness and mental availability. “Mental availability” is about making your company top-of-mind when it’s time for someone to buy, which is critical to long-term business success when you consider that in most industries only 5% of buyers are in the market to buy at any given time.
Here are some of the tactics in the book to reach the rest of your market. If you need to understand how to execute any of these approaches, Louis’s book will be a huge help, it goes through each tactic in detail, including many detailed examples and illustrations.
- Content marketing
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Online display ads
- Video and podcast production
- Social media
- PR
- Events
- Print advertising
What you can do in step 3 is a pretty limitless and that’s why many businesses get stuck here. If you’re doing stuff on this list and feel like you’re stuck, go back to the beginning of this post, and read the Bullseye framework again. Then buy the book!