It's 7.30 on a Thursday morning and you're at a networking breakfast. Coffee in one hand, a slightly cold croissant in the other.
Someone you've never met walks straight up to you. No hello, no "what do you do?" Just a business card pushed into your hand, a thirty-second speech about their amazing offer, and then the question.
"So, shall I book you in?"
You don't know their name. You don't know what they really do. You definitely don't know whether you trust them. Every alarm bell you've got is ringing. So you smile, say something polite, and spend the rest of the breakfast making sure you're never stood next to them again.
Nobody in that room would call that good selling. But most businesses do exactly the same thing every day. They just do it with ads, posts and emails instead of a business card.
What marketing is for
There's a lot of confusion about what marketing actually is. Ask ten business owners and you'll get ten answers. Brand. Leads. Ads. Social media. Getting the phone to ring.
I think it's much simpler than that. The purpose of marketing is to start a conversation. That conversation goes one of two ways. Either people are talking to you, or people are talking about you. Both count.
Because here's the thing. If no one knows who you are, they can't buy from you anyway.
There are three truths I keep coming back to.
Marketing earns permission.
Sales earns commitment.
Confusion creates friction.
Where the friction comes from
Most of that confusion comes from one place. People try to sell before they've earned the right to.
The person building the relationship and the person making the offer get muddled about which job they're doing. So they go for the sale before they've even got permission to have the conversation. The ad that asks a stranger to buy on the first click. The cold email with a booking link in the second line. The business card at breakfast.
All it does is put people on high alert. It creates friction, and it makes your own job harder. Now you have to undo the bad first impression before you can even start.
Marketing gets you permission. Sales gets you the commitment. Get them in the right order and both get easier.
The five jobs of marketing
So if marketing isn't there to close the sale, what is it actually doing? Five things.
Start conversations. Give people a reason to talk to you, and a reason to talk about you. A post that gets a reply. An email someone answers. A recommendation passed from one friend to another.
Get people to recognise you. People buy from people they know. Show up again and again, in the same places, saying the same kind of thing, until your name and face are familiar before anyone needs what you sell.
Make it easy for them to talk to you. Answer the comments. Read the replies. Never send emails from a do-not-reply address. If someone takes the time to answer you, that's the conversation you were trying to start in the first place. Don't make them hunt for a way to get in touch.
Make it easy for them to buy from you. When someone is ready, the next step should be obvious. One clear way to book, order or pay. No forms that feel like a tax return.
Manage expectations. Tell people what will happen, how it works and who it's for. And just as important, who it isn't for.
That last one matters more than most people realise.
Satisfaction equals experience minus expectation
Someone said something to me recently that has stuck with me ever since. Satisfaction equals experience minus expectation. It turns out David Maister put almost exactly that into a formula back in 1985, as his first law of service: satisfaction equals perception minus expectation.
However you write it, the maths is simple.
If the expectation is set higher than the experience, the answer is negative. The customer is disappointed, even if what you delivered was good.
If the experience beats the expectation, people are happy. Even if both were fairly low to begin with.
That's why managing expectations is so important. Overpromise in your marketing to get the sale, and you've set yourself up to disappoint someone before they've even started. Be clear and honest, and the same experience leaves people delighted.
Conversation rates before conversion rates
Most business owners, when they think about results, go straight to conversion rates. What percentage of visitors buy? How many calls turn into clients?
Those numbers matter. But before you start thinking about conversion rates, you need to be thinking about conversation rates.
How many conversations do you actually start?
If you're starting five a month, no amount of clever selling will turn that into fifty clients. Fix the conversations first and your conversion rate has something to work with.
What to do this week
Count your conversations. Look back over the last month and add up how many people actually spoke to you, or about you, because of something you put out. Write the number down.
Look at your last five pieces of marketing. For each one, ask a simple question. Is this trying to start a conversation, or is it trying to close a sale with someone who doesn't know me yet?
Then check the five jobs. Would people recognise you? Is it easy to talk to you? Is it easy to buy from you? Does your marketing set an expectation you can beat?
Back to that networking breakfast. Imagine the same person walks up, says hello, and asks what you do. They listen. They ask a decent follow-up question. At the end, they say "this has been great, can I drop you a line next week?"
That's marketing. They've started a conversation and earned permission. Whether it turns into a sale is a job for later.
Pick one of those five jobs and work on it this week. And if you'd like more like this, join The Mix, my newsletter.
