As you embark on your marketing plan for 2020 and beyond, you’ll want to find a way to identify potential customers and the unique reasons they would be interested in your product or service. You’ll probably find it in objective data sources such as data analyst surveys or research into factors such as trustworthiness and reputation.

But what if you can’t have a direct, quantifiable method for determining the value of an offer or a combination of things that add up to better customer satisfaction?

The message you’ve already built is a business case. In other words, you’ve already created the foundation for all the other information and data to align with your goals and your sales process. That, as they say, is part of the job.

The challenge lies in finding the right people, tools and processes that will help to drive your primary goals, but also ensure their success. When we first sold our businesses we had to apply a great deal of discipline and attention to ensure that our data and our verbal objectives synced up. It took a lot of work to make sure that every page of our brochure and TV advertising were aligned and matched with the needs and wants of our target audiences.

The truth is, your customers will also want to be able to track your successes and how you are tracking against your objectives. You have to give them every single opportunity you can. They are investors.

Furthermore, you’ve got to design the roadmap and the tools and processes for an efficient deployment that can deliver a robust return on investment and be repeatable.

The secret is to design the tools and processes that your company uses to coordinate the different elements of your marketing. Those inbound strategies and technologies include:

Communications

Content promotion and marketing communications

Events

Outreach

Guidance and guidance

Marketing automation and predictive analytics

It’s important to make sure all of those places are supported by industry standards and standards for both accuracy and effectiveness.

What’s most important is to understand that marketing and sales needs are different. Marketing is about creative strategy and a succinct pitch. It’s about creating a clear purpose and a compelling story, such as the one Mike Cowan is telling in his brilliant new book, The 1% Club and how we became their 1% club and having our methods reviewed every year for that purpose.

Sales, as Cowan says, is all about transactional information and price differentiation, leading to consideration, plans, campaigns and more. With both of those needs, there’s lots of opportunity for marketing to deliver one-on-one communication and relationship building, but the key is to use your tactics in the most relevant way possible and to then give those tactics the best possible grounding.