Marketers' business thinking

In the workplace, having a say will bring you a better future, and to gain a say you must be able to create performance for the company. To reflect value, marketers need to start with the company's needs, and then look for overlaps between the company's needs and customer needs. This article is recommended for those who want to improve their business thinking.

During this period, I, like everyone else, was experiencing the torment of market changes. Budgets were reduced (even to zero), the entire department was facing layoffs, and there was a fear of being KOed by AI... It was like a sword hanging over my head. It would be a lie to say I wasn't anxious.

My work has slowed down because of this, and when I am confused, I will ask myself again, "What is the value of marketing in the new situation?"

In order to find the answer, I opened the book "Deep Marketing - 12 Principles of Marketing" again. When I saw this picture, it suddenly became clear to me.

The above picture is from the e-book "Deep Marketing"

In order to demonstrate value, marketers should first start with company needs and then look for overlap between company needs and customer needs.

For example, if the company's current business is mainly based on the renewal of old customers, the marketer should focus on existing customers and find marketing points, such as customer satisfaction surveys, renewal promotion offers, thank-you carnivals, etc. This principle is not difficult at all, and it is even a bit too basic.

But if you are still blindly copying the funnel theory to acquire customers, although it is valuable, it is busy and tiring, and it seems that you "don't understand the business."

But this brings us to the second question, what is business? Is it sales?

Literally, the English word for business is Business, and its synonym is business. When we say that a person has business sense, we mean that he understands how a company operates and how to make money.

Taking a company that develops its own products as an example, business operations are the coordination of multiple links from discovering market demand to R&D, production, sales, and service.

Larger and more mature companies also emphasize operation and management, managing their business from the perspectives of strategy, organization, budget, and planning.

We all know that sales is a process of finding customers, promoting products or services, signing orders and completing delivery. It is also a key link in achieving revenue and profit.

I believe that marketers’ business thinking is reflected in their value to operations, business, and sales, such as:

In terms of strategy , you can use your insight to obtain information about the industry, market, and competitors and refine your opinions to assist in decision-making. In terms of business , you can understand business plans such as product planning, sales strategy, and customer operations, and then put forward a "growth proposal". In terms of sales, you can follow up on the conversion of leads to signed orders, etc.

Over the years, based on my observations of a small sample, marketing strategy, product marketing, and digital marketing positions are more popular . In fact, they are more involved in the business and it is easy to start from the company's needs and then combine them with market demand, so they feel more valuable.

How to improve business thinking? Let’s take a look at a few examples around us:

Case 1: A new regional sales director was appointed to a small company A, which was preparing to enter the lower-tier markets and promote a certain standardized product. The sales teams of each branch were expanding on a large scale, so the marketing department was also expected to set up positions in the local area to assist with sales.

Xiao A is very distressed. Based on past experience, the regional market has less workload (mostly miscellaneous work) and a small budget, making it very difficult to recruit people.

After transforming his business thinking, Xiao A first understood the company's overall sales goals, analyzed the degree of match between product functions and the needs of the sinking market, and got a rough idea of ​​the market input and output. The second step was to make assumptions and calculate the costs of setting up positions in the region and at the headquarters (including labor costs, market resource input costs, and management costs), the degree of workload saturation, the measurement criteria for input and output, and qualitative analysis of advantages and disadvantages.

After communicating with the sales staff with these questions, we put forward professional market expansion suggestions, which were recognized by the sales team.

Case 2: Xiao B asked me to help her look at the annual marketing plan. The entire plan is divided into three parts: market analysis, product promotion, and marketing activities, and is clearly organized.

But when I opened the specific activity details, I found that the previous content was all "decoration" and had nothing to do with the subsequent plan. It was all traditional marketing routines, that is, what should have been done before was done, and it did not reflect which ones corresponded to business expansion strategies and which ones corresponded to new product launches...

I asked her what feedback she got from sales, and she said that the ROI requirement had to be 10:1, but it seemed like she didn't take it seriously.

I suggested that she re-analyze the business from the perspective of the business, and then see how each marketing department cooperates. For example, if she wants to expand her retail customers to 100, she might be able to work with the top customers to create a hit case, spread it through video accounts and Xiaohongshu, and hold a series of knowledge salons on topics of concern to the industry.

After Xiao B disassembled each business strategy, he communicated with the sales team with professional proposals. After listening to the revised version, the sales director gave a lot of good suggestions and promised that the team would fully cooperate to achieve the goal together.

Case 3: Xiao C held a customer event and invited customers who attended the meeting to have dinner together in the evening. After arranging the seats, there was a table without sales, so Xiao C sat down by himself and chatted with the customers.

During the dinner, the client mentioned that this study was very rewarding. Now that the company is in the expansion stage, he wondered if he could learn more about human resources products. Xiao C responded quickly and immediately introduced the advantages of the company's human resources solutions and contacted relevant sales.

The sales team was only focusing on big customers at the time and didn’t pay much attention to this demand. Xiao C judged that the fact that this customer sent three people to participate in the event showed that they recognized the product and company brand. In addition, he also analyzed that the industry in which the customer was located was a downstream enterprise in a popular track and might soon start to expand its staff.

Xiao C continued to communicate with the customer and invited the customer to participate in many online and offline activities. Soon the sales department picked up a ready-made order and was very grateful to Xiao C and the marketing department.

There are many more cases like this.

Have you found that when marketers start to think from a business perspective and try to communicate with executives and sales teams using business language, they are more willing to listen, and the work of the marketing department is not that difficult to carry out.

Let’s talk about the CMO survey mentioned in “In-depth Marketing”. As many as 76% of CMOs believe that they are good at discovering important matters of the company and aligning with the company’s leaders. However, only 46% of CEOs believe that their CMO understands the direction of the organization’s development and is consistent with the core team’s views.

I believe the gap is caused by the lack of business thinking.

How to have business thinking is certainly not something that can be acquired by attending a class once. Communication with various departments in daily work, empathy, even short-term rotation, and participation in certain customer projects are all ways.

But before taking specific actions, marketers can first think about "What is the long-term and short-term significance of what we are going to do for the company? What sales returns or impact enhancements can it bring?"

And this may be the first step towards business thinking and the starting point of quantitative marketing.

Author: Hanni

Source: WeChat public account: Time Notebook (ID: Think-Growth)