Picture from David Skok Blog

Sales and Marketing Machine is a structured methodology addressing customer acquisition process by David Skok, this article is a short 2-page summary sheet for this methodology.
 
For the full version from David Skok, please see this presentation.

Building a Sales and Marketing Machine is a structured methodology for designing and reviewing the customer acquisition process. It stresses the idea that the only right way to build a sales and marketing process is to design it around your customers (customer-centric) by taking into consideration the customer’s concerns and motivations.

The goal of building a Sales and Marketing Machine is to optimize the sales and marketing funnel^[2] as well as the overall conversion rate from visitors to closed deals^[3] . So how to build this machine? David Skok gave 9 steps to construct it.

Step 1: Identify

Identify all the people involved in the purchase decision.

Step 2: Understand

Sketch out their buying process and concerns at each stage.

Step 3: Entice

Add the steps to address their buying process and their concerns.

Step 4: Align

Align every marketing activity around one goal, creating leads that help sales.

• Rule 1: If it doesn’t create a lead, or directly contribute towards closing a sale, it doesn’t belong. E.g. Brand advertising doesn’t belong to marketing activities.
• Rule 2: If the cost per lead is too high, it doesn’t belong, except that you can recover cost through higher conversion rate or higher average sale size. E.g.Trades shows don’t always belong to marketing activities.

Step 5: Link

Create link flows from start to finish.

• At the end of every action, there should be a link to the next section.
• The overall flow from the start to the finish should be carefully designed.
• Every action should contribute clearly to moving the lead through the closed deal.
• Connection between sales funnel and customer’s purchasing stages:

Top of the funnel	Middle of the funnel	Sales
Awareness: Creating awareness & Driving traffic	Consideration: Nurturing and Qualifying	Purchase: Selling and Closing

• Lead stages: Raw lead (from top of the funnel) → MQL, marketing qualified lead(from middle of the funnel) → Sales qualified lead (opportunity for sales) →Closed deals

Step 6: Automate

Automate the key funnel stages

Top of the funnel	Middle of the funnel	Sales
Inbound marketing	Marketing automation	CRM

Step 7: Measure

Several metrics to measure conversion:

Picture from [2]

Step 8: Analyze

Identify the blockage points:

• How to identify the blockage points? Thinking what is stopping me from increasing sales by 5 times?

Step 9: Improve

The key to success is to deep understand your customers and using out-of-the-box thinking to build trust with customers and sell products.

• The pattern of blockage points: You are hoping your customers will do something that they are not motivated to do. In other words, you designed your funnel the way you hoped it would work but you may not have thought enough about the customer’s point of view.
• Solution:

Know your customer’s concerns	Understand what motivates them	Create a solution that entice them
- Hate being sold to - Find it offensive togive name and email - Don’t want to get spam sales emails - Worried that email address will be givento other marketers	- Want to solve problem - Recommendation from afriend - Education - Data/information report - Entertainment - Free stuff - Meeting other people have insights to share	- Customer testimonials address vendor risk - Free trials address product viability and fit concern - Lowest price guarantees

• Driving traffic to your website: On top page of Google search / Recommended bya trusted source / Referred to in social media or blogosphere
• Using data to drive web traffic: E.g. Sysomos leveraged their database to create blog posts with data on topics of current interest.
• Getting customers to sign up for a trial to handle customer’s concern.
• Using freemium: E.g. Dropbox first gets you hooked for free, then storage slowly increases to the point where you need to pay. But by then they have established trust and it’s hard to move your data that has been shared with others.
• Build trust: Selling is 10 times easier once you have established trust.

Appendix

[1] For Entrepreneurs Blog, David Skok, "Sales and Marketing Machine | For Entrepreneurs | For Entrepreneurs.". Accessed 2 Apr. 2017.
[2] Slideshare, David Skok, "Build a Sales & Marketing Machine David Skok - SlideShare.", 18 Dec. 2010, Accessed 2 Apr. 2017.
[3] Video, Michael J Skok, "Building a Sales and Marketing Machine - YouTube." . 13 Jan. 2013, Accessed 2 Apr. 2017.