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<\/div>\nAnd Why Should You Care?<\/h2>\n
Before I write an article, I always conduct keyword research to make sure I\u2019m using the right terminology. I want to use the words real people use to find things. In this case, when I went to lookup Marketing Systems<\/strong> or Systematic Selling,<\/strong> I found very few people looking up anything of the sort.<\/p>\n I expanded my search and looked up Selling Systems<\/strong> \u2013 not much there. Business Development Systems<\/strong> \u2013 nope. Marketing Process Mapping<\/strong> \u2013 nada. Rather than the thousands of searches per month I usually find, I saw 2, and 3-digit counts. Marketing Automation<\/strong> with 5,400 searches per month appeared to be the only search term representing an interest in marketing systems. I wager the people searching for Marketing Automation are more eCommerce focused than your average business owner.<\/p>\n Marketing Plan<\/strong> gets 18,100 searches per month and Strategic Marketing Plan<\/strong> gets 8,100. Clearly people want to approach marketing strategically. I am not, however, seeing the average business owner engaged in the marketing systems conversation, yet.<\/p>\n Every business owner wants a return on their marketing investment. They want sales from new and existing customers. So where is the interest in making the sales and marketing process effective? Marketing Analytics<\/strong> gets 4,400 searches per month, so we know people are at least interested in improving performance.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing. To make any sense of the raw marketing analytics data, you need to start thinking about systems and the customer\u2019s journey. Without the context of the system, it\u2019s difficult to make performance improvements.<\/p>\n Our routines, processes and systems are what make us productive and effective. The industrial revolution showed us all the power of business processes and assembly lines. So, where\u2019s the conversation about marketing systems development?<\/p>\n My theory is that people are still looking at marketing from a task, project, and campaign perspective. Taking the next step and recognizing sales and marketing in system terms requires a mental leap.\u00a0Sure, the eCommerce folks get it and we all hear about big data and the information economy, but how far have these practices trickled down? The search statistics indicate we have a long way to go.<\/p>\n Systems theory<\/strong><\/em> \u201c\u2026analyzes a phenomenon seen as a whole and not as simply the sum of elementary parts. The focus is on the interactions and on the relationships between parts in order to understand an entity\u2019s organization, functioning and outcomes.\u201d A Brief Review of Systems Theories and Their Managerial Applications.<\/a><\/p>\n The Business Dictionary<\/strong> defines Systems<\/strong> as: \u201c\u2026 (a) inputs, outputs and feedback mechanisms, (b) maintain an internal steady-state despite a changing external environment, (c) display properties that are different than the whole (called emergent properties) but are not possessed by any of the individual elements, and (d) have boundaries that are usually defined by the system observer.\u201d<\/p>\n In simple terms, your marketing system is your repeatable process for initiating and developing client relationships to maximize lifetime value. I prefer to focus on the purpose of the system rather than the component activities. The purpose of a marketing system is to develop long-term client relationships, maximize lifetime value and drive earnings growth.<\/p>\n You can break a marketing system down into a series of macro stages or cycles to set up and optimize. These stages include:<\/p>\n This is an oversimplification, but you get the idea. There are several customer-facing macro stages in the process that fit together as a system. Each stage may involve several activities, recurring campaigns, and support technologies, each of which can perform well or poorly. They either create value or cost money.<\/p>\n Think about all the activities and subsystems necessary to initiate and nurture client relationships over several years. This is the system business owners need to set up and manage. Why? Because it\u2019s how you grow your business and achieve financial goals.<\/p>\n Generally, sales and marketing get treated as tasks, projects, or campaigns. It\u2019s not wrong, it\u2019s actually the easiest and most pragmatic way to get things done. Unfortunately, the focus ends up being the completion of each task, out of context with its role and purpose within the system.<\/p>\n Independent tasks are the most granular components. They are the nuts and bolts of the system. There are 100\u2019s if not 1000\u2019s of them. Each with the potential of being made-to-purpose or generic parts for someone else to sort out how they fit. Think about your logo, your tagline, an individual blog post, a sales call, a networking meeting, a hero shot or an advertisement. They are generally random bits and pieces of your marketing toolkit that can be stitched together in several different ways.<\/p>\n Marketing projects involve stitching many nuts and bolt components together into larger and more complex tools. Websites, brochures, videos\/animations, and setting up CRM software are good examples.<\/p>\n Campaigns are the next level of complexity. They generally involve several projects that work together to produce a result. They are often cyclical in nature. Driving traffic to a sales-focused website, old-school catalogue mailings, tradeshows and fundraising drives are all good examples of campaigns. You might have dozens of campaigns running at the same time focused on different objectives.<\/p>\n This is the global or systemic view of how all the activities, projects and campaigns work together to achieve strategic objectives. You can think about it as analogous to net worth management in financial terms.<\/p>\n Its purpose is to align and harmonize all the nested parts. It is the C-level management view of your sales and marketing investments combined with how you are managing and developing customer relationship assets.<\/p>\n The most common answer is at the task and\/or project level. We affectionately call this being engaged in Random Acts of Marketing.<\/a> It\u2019s characterized by sales and marketing busyness. There might be a lot of activity, but it generally amounts to very little in terms of tangible results.<\/p>\n Why? Because there is no clear purpose, stated objectives, performance measurement or continuous improvement involved. Hope is the strategy and things are begrudgingly financed out of discretionary funds.\u00a0Throwing spaghetti against the wall is another common metaphor for what normally happens.<\/p>\n Fortunately, making the shift to a systems approach is not as onerous as you might think. It is more of a paradigm shift than anything. It mostly involves shifting your perspective and viewing all the nuts and bolts as components with a defined role to play within your system.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s no clear role for a component, it gets axed from the roster. Once a role and purpose are defined, you establish performance criteria for each stage in the system as well as the system as a whole. Once your system is working and you can measure its performance, you start the tuning and refinement process.<\/p>\n Building and optimizing your front-end business system to maximize earnings growth is an entirely different proposition.<\/p>\n You shift your focus from spending money on random activities, to investing in optimizing your customer\u2019s journey through your business. You\u2019re constantly monitoring your system and investing wherever you\u2019ll get the biggest lift in performance.<\/p>\n There is nothing preventing small business owners from taking a systems view of their sales and marketing function. There\u2019s no calculus involved. The system requirements are all accessible to small businesses. The only barrier is you changing how you think about sales and marketing.<\/p>\n The rest happens a little at a time. Rome wasn\u2019t built in a day and neither are marketing systems and earnings growth programs. What you do is make sure you\u2019re always \u201cstarting with the end in mind\u201d, allocating marketing resources strategically, measuring your KPIs and working to optimize performance. The alternative is endless waste on the random acts of marketing treadmill.<\/p>\n To get you started, we\u2019ve prepared a series of free eBooks<\/a> and a book called BEING Profitable<\/a>. The book breaks the marketing system down into three phases and twenty logical steps. The goal is to help you see marketing as a system and understand how it works. We\u2019ve also prepared several articles<\/a> to help you Make The Shift.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And Why Should You Care? \u00a0Print This Post Before I write an article, I always conduct keyword research to make sure I\u2019m using the right terminology. I want to use the words real people use to find things. In this case, when I went to lookup Marketing Systems or Systematic Selling, I found very few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[8402,28286,11637,2345,28493,85810],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-230302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","tag-marketing","tag-marketing-systems","tag-shift","tag-system","tag-systematic","tag-systems-thinking"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Print](\"https:\/\/accruemarketing.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-print\/images\/printer_famfamfam.gif\" "\\"Print")
<\/a>\u00a0Print This Post<\/a><\/p>\n<\/header>\nWhy The Lack of Interest?<\/h3>\n
Performance and Efficiency Basics<\/h3>\n
Let\u2019s Start With a Few Definitions<\/h3>\n
What is a System?<\/h3>\n
What is a Sales and Marketing System?<\/h3>\n
Let\u2019s Break Marketing Systems Down<\/h3>\n
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How Are Sales and Marketing Managed Now?<\/h3>\n
Independent Tasks and Activities<\/h3>\n
Marketing Projects<\/h3>\n
Marketing Campaigns<\/h3>\n
An Earnings Growth Program<\/h3>\n
Where Are You Operating?<\/h3>\n
How Do You Make The Shift?<\/h3>\n
You\u2019re Not Spending Money on Marketing<\/h3>\n
Systems Are Not a Big Business Only Proposition<\/h3>\n
Where to Begin?<\/h3>\n