Determining the Right Blend of Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing are like conjoined twins; one cannot survive without the other. Determining how you allocate your resources between the two depends on these factors:
how long you’ve been in business
your average customer sale value
industry norms
your own personal comfort level with sales activities
I’m going to show you that there is a level of sales activity for everyone, even if you are (still) terrified of selling!
While I had previously advocated that everyone needed to make cold calls if they wanted to grow beyond referrals, my firm’s increasing lack of success with this method (as a service for clients) led me away from cold outreach of any kind. But after many conversations with other sales professionals, it turns out that cold calling is still alive and well in certain industries, and cold emailing may be a successful strategy for some businesses.
How Should YOU Invest your Sales and Marketing Resources?
To help you determine the blend of sales and marketing and the specific activities that are right for you I’ve created this dual axis chart to illustrate the continuum between marketing activity/investment and sales activity/investment AND a range of activities between cold and warm outreach. The trick is to align your sales and marketing activities with your business’s needs and your own comfort level. There is a right answer for everyone, and it will be different for every business owner.
Low Average Sale Value
Businesses that have a lower average customer sales value need a higher volume of sales to be successful, as depicted in the lower left hand corner. These are typically products that can be purchased quickly and easily without the aid of a salesperson. Most consumer products, and in the B2B space, online courses are good examples. There is not much need for sales activity or investment as the buying process can be automated. But marketing investment needs to be correspondingly higher.
High Ticket Items
Diagonally across the chart, in the top right corner, are those businesses that have a high price point and can be successful with a correspondingly low number of sales. When your average customer sales value is $50k or higher, you probably won’t be spending as much time or money on marketing to your smaller potential client pool, but you will be spending time and money setting up meetings with referral partners and having conversations with potential clients as a result of warm introductions. Your conversations are already further along in the customer journey and your activity is more sales focused.
Service-Based Businesses
For B2B service businesses where average customer sales value is somewhere in the middle and there is a great deal of competition, more marketing might be needed (shown in the top left corner). Your service is still purchased after a conversation with you (sales), but you may need to invest more in marketing to have potential customers find you in the first place. Cold outreach, even to a highly targeted group of prospects, is unlikely to yield a good ROI since predicting when a prospect will need your service is virtually impossible and there are plenty of options for them to choose from. They might view your service as a commodity and aren’t likely to entertain efforts to build relationships until they’ve identified a need for your service.
And finally, the bottom right quadrant is an unlikely place for any business to find themselves. It’s rare for high touch sales activities to combine with cold outreach in today’s marketplace.
Determining Which Quadrant is Right for You
How do you determine where you fit on these two axes? First, you need to determine the right spot on the marketing/sales axis for your business. How long have you been in business? Does your target market know about you and your services? If your best potential clients don’t know you exist then more marketing investment may be warranted. If, on the other hand, your marketing is producing high quality, qualified leads, you may want to shift your activity/investment level further to the right and invest a little more in sales activities. To be clear, when I talk about investing in sales or marketing activities that investment includes all resources, including your time.
Warm Sales Activities Might Be Easier
Your spot on the vertical access is determined by what works for your business, in your industry, AND your own comfort level with cold versus warm outreach. I suspect you’re probably more comfortable with proactive outreach than you think are . . .
Let’s start with defining what proactive warm outreach includes:
having conversations with existing or past clients
following up with networking connections you’ve met
asking people you already know for introductions to specific individuals
You’re taking proactive sales action towards getting new clients, but you are leapfrogging over the need to establish trust. This helps eliminate what often makes you feel ‘salesy’. Remember, you’re not trying to ‘sell’ to everyone, but only to those whom you believe might be experiencing the issue you solve and who need help right now.
Moving down the axis towards cold is where I would position introduction requests made to new connections or people you don’t know very well. You’re still attempting to facilitate a warm introduction, but you may not have invested enough social/relational capital for your network to be inclined to make those connections for you.
Further down the axis is cold outreach, both email and phone. And this is what generates the greatest amount of ‘ick’ from virtually everyone. Partly because we’re all being bombarded with poorly targeted cold emails and calls daily, and partly because we’ve now become a society that only buys when we’re ready. We don’t like to be ‘sold’.
Some businesses have made the calculation that cold outreach, even when it generates only a 2% return, is still worthwhile. Whatever they’ve spent using technology to send tens of thousands of emails, they’re getting enough from it to make it worth the investment. The same for companies that use automatic diallers; they’ve made the calculation that more dials equals more sales. I hope they’ve also calculated the potential damage to their brand’s reputation too . . .
What about highly targeted, extremely personalized cold outreach? If you’ve tried all the warm outreach activities listed above and you’re still not getting the results you need to grow your business, you might consider some level of cold outreach.
Many of the sales professionals I spoke to advocated this type of proactive selling, but qualified it by saying it must be low volume because it’s so specific and highly researched. Not to mention creative too. Sending yet another email? Unlikely to get through. Leaving voicemail after voicemail? Unless it’s highly personal and dialled in to what your prospects want, it’s likely to be deleted.
What appears to be working, at least in the early part of 2025, is highly creative and based on something you know about your prospect. You might get through with something unexpected and creative that is about you and your service offer, but you’ve got a much better chance if what you’re doing is both creative, highly personalized to the individual and not about you.
One trick I use when I’m thinking about creative outreach is to run it through the ‘why should I care?’ test. Imagine YOU are on the receiving end of your message. Why should you care?
So what’s the answer for your small business? It depends. You’ll need to consider all the factors that determine where you are on the marketing/sales continuum, and you’ll need to evaluate your own personal comfort level on the warm/cold continuum in the context of your business, your industry and your sales goals.