Is your sales & marketing customer-focused? Two simple tests can find out

Think your sales process and marketing strategy is focused on the customer?  Here are two quick & simple ways to find out:

Marketing Materials:  Take your most prominent collateral, email templates, advertisements, etc.  Get a red pen and a blue pen.  With the red pen, circle any word that’s focused on you and/or your company (we, I, us, company name, product name, etc.).  With a blue pen, circle any word that’s focused on the customer (you, your, customer name, customer goals/outcomes, etc.).  Do you have more red than blue?

Sales Process:  Look at the name of the stages in your sales process.  Are they customer-centric words like discovery, diagnosis, consensus, delivery, etc.?  Or are they company and sales team-centric words like approach, presentation, negotiation, close?  Now check out your primary sales presentation.  How many slides up front focus on describing your company?  What % of slides focus on the company and your solutions vs. your customers’ situation, problems, objectives and expected outcomes?

This may not be exhaustive or conclusive, but it may be an indicator that there’s room to improve how well you’re creating credibility, trust and connectivity with prospective customers.