These activities are performed by the Revenue Department. These activities happen in parallel all the time. When building a company or a new product, you can using the following sequence to organize your thoughts, but the work won’t be completed entirely in this sequence. You’ll have to work on all the parts in iterations.
Market Intelligence. This is part of the marketing effort where you conduct market research, identify the target market, engage the target market to learn more about them, compile what you’ve learned, and inform the rest of the team.
Market Strategy. This is part of the marketing effort where you figure out what to build and how to present it to customers. This is strategy because it involves making choices that will require investment, they will constrain operations because time and money will be spent on the consequences of those choices, and it will take time and money to make different choices if a pivot is needed. Once those choices are made and people and money and time are spent pursuing them, it will either gain momentum and succeed or it will fail. If it fails it will become a loss to the company. If the company doesn’t have enough resources to try something else it will go out of business.
Marketing Outreach. This is everything you do to attract customers, including building awareness that your product exists and will solve their problem.
Sales. This may involve inbound sales (when a customer contacts you to buy your product) or outbound sales (when you call or visit a customer to sell your product). The process ends with an agreement wherein the customer pays or commits to paying for the product and you deliver it or commit to delivering it.
Service. This involves all follow-up interactions with the customer to ensure they are getting value from the product. It may involve regular maintenance of the product. It may also involve a customer returning a defective item and demanding a fix or a refund. Some businesses don’t have service at all, while others are fanatical about customer service.
Market Intelligence
Market research. Work with the information department to define the learning goals, identify what information is already on hand, what is needed, and how to get it. Then execute that plan to get the information.
Identifying the target market. This may also be called finding the “perfect-fit customer” or the “ideal customer profile”. The target market can change over time due to economics, advances in technology, societal changes, and more. The marketing department must continuously re-examine and identify the target market.
Engage the target market. This means talking with people and learning about their problems and “pain points” and becoming very familiar with these. When you know it well enough, you should be able to articulate their problem better than they can — with more detail and more insight because you’ve been talking with many people about it. These conversations can be informal like drinking a coffee together and talking, or they can be formal like paying people to participate in a focus group.
Market Strategy
Using the information collected by market intelligence and professional expertise, the market strategy team makes critical decisions for the company’s direction.
Product positioning. This means deciding how the product will be presented to the market. Is it cheap or expensive? Is it mass-produced or customized? Is it plain or luxurious? Is it basic or sophisticated? Is it boring or exciting?
Product management. Deciding what product or service to build for customers, what features it needs to have, what qualities it needs to have, how it will be packaged, etc.
Building a brand. This includes defining the brand style and usage rules.
Market Outreach
Social media. Maintain a social media presence to build awareness of the product and teach the brand. Create links between other topics and the product. Also responsible for responding to complaints.
Advertising. Responsible for using a variety of media to build awareness of the product and teach the brand. Includes search ads, site ads, television ads, email lists, and direct mail.
Public relations. Responsible for publishing press releases and public statements. This effort supports building awareness and teaching the brand.
Community. This includes outreach, charity involvement, representing the business in industry associations, and more. This effort supports attracting customers.
Influence. An influence campaign is a coordinated effort to influence a specific audience to take action. This could be buying the product, recommending the product to others, talking about the product, lobbying government officials and representatives to change laws or regulations in a way that will benefit people who want to buy and use the product, or any other positive action.
Sales
Inbound. When a customer visits the website, calls, schedules an online meeting, or visits in person.
Outbound. When the team contacts the customer by email (cold emails), by phone (cold calls) or in person (door-to-door).
Service
Training. Teaching customers how to use the product to get the best results.
Support. Helping customers with trouble using the product.
Billing. Sending invoices to customers.
Payments. Collecting payment from customers.
Interviews. Follow-up conversations with customers to get testimonials and product feedback, to learn how we can serve them better.
Reception. For a business with a physical location, the reception desk helps customers connect with the right person to help them. For a business with a call center, the first contact with the caller is the reception. For a business with an online chat feature, the first contact with the visitor is the reception.