What is the Purpose of Your Business?

Keep your business on the right path

Take a step back from your daily routine and reflect on the purpose of your business. I know, you're thinking this is a stupid question. I assert that if you do not meditate on this simple concept periodically, your business is at increasing risk of drifting away from its charted path.

So that new readers are aware of the perspective from which I write, the majority of our customers here at the CMS4i shop are involved in manufacturing or distributing industrial process control instruments and equipment. The selling of these products is generally application specific, and requires technical knowledge and problem solving skills that most people would not normally have. This puts our customers squarely in the sphere of technical sales professionals, and that is the target audience of this article.

So, technical sellers, in case your thinking may have gotten off track, I shall remind you of something that is very important to your success...

The purpose of business is to collect checks.

Simple. Of course, in order to do that, there are other activities at which you need to excel.

• Post delivery follow up and assurance of customer satisfaction.
• Delivery and performance of your product or service.
• Securing the order or contract.
• Submitting a proposal or quote.
• Eliciting information about customer expectations.
• Getting approved or considered as a vendor.
• Showing your value, delivering your value proposition.
• Get known.

All of the above are tasks or skills at which you must be competent in order to survive as a purveyor of technical products. I listed them in the reverse order of which they are usually executed in order to make a point. These activities can be considered to be dependently sequential in their flow from the bottom to the top of the list. If you are not successful at completing a task, it is unlikely that you will proceed up the chain and ultimately get an order from the customer. It is all connected in a fashion that puts more value on the earlier stages.

Surely, you can point to some instances in your career where you succeeded, in spite of your mistakes. You have likely been able to shortcut the process a few times. There are also memories of orders that just seemed to fall from the sky into your hands. It’s time for a reality check here. We are not successful because of these aberrations. Success is based upon the commonplace, every day, somewhat repetitive, normal course of business that lives under the fat part of a bell curve.

Distribution of Transactions: Degree of Sales Engineer Involvement

Your personal success is based upon how often you can enter the list of successive tasks shown above, at the bottom, and proceed to the point of obtaining an order.

At this point, you may be musing about what all this has to do with digital marketing, social media, and the Internet.

How are social media and digital marketing activities going to help you get better outcomes from each of those process steps in my list of necessary tasks?

Most of the heavy lifting is up to you, my tech seller comrades. The digital marketing and social media efforts your company has put into place are specifically targeted at the initial, but most essential, step in the sales process….getting known. Getting the company known, the lines known, the products known, and building a brand or image that…

• Is universally positive.
• Stays “top of mind” with potential customers.

…That’s what this is all about. There may some additional benefits as you progress up the task ladder toward an order, but those are not as profound.

Once you make a personal connection with a purchasing decision maker for a project, it’s all up to you. You know what to do, how to do it, and your success is based upon your professional skills and the desirability of the products you sell. The marketing efforts we conduct on the Internet for your company are targeted to get you the opportunity to apply your skills directly at revenue generating activities.

Let's summarize:

• The goal of your business is to generate revenue.
• Revenue is generated through the successful performance of a generally sequential set of tasks.
• Getting known, or being known, is the initial step in every transaction.
• The purpose of digital marketing and social media activities is to establish a presence, get you known, achieve a level of recognition in your customer base.
• The greatest volume and most efficient opportunities for revenue generation exist in the mundane sphere of everyday business activity.

Other articles in this blog, which you are encouraged to follow, will cover specific things you can do to boost the effectiveness of digital marketing and social media activities conducted by you and your company. The endgame is to deliver more opportunities for you to ply your craft and collect checks.

Subscribe to the blog for more content on digital marketing and social media marketing. Comment, or contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we are here to help you make things work, so contact us anytime.