How to avoid playing to an empty theatre

…and letting people in without paying

Somewhere between marketing and sales, there is a gap that can feel like a chasm if you don’t fill it in – welcome to “sales enablement”.

Let’s start with marketing.  The world is full of amazing businesses who would make millions if only people apparently knew they existed.

The world is a noisy place.  Getting your message out there can be difficult but bizarrely it’s often one of the things that fall to the bottom of the list when you’re looking at all the other things you have on your plate.

But just take your website in isolation – your window to the world.  So many businesses set it up and leave it to languish there unloved and untended.  Nothing bad happens as a result – or so they think.   Well, Google will get tired of your new website after a while if you don’t maintain it, and produce new content regularly. As a result, their algorithms will show it to less and less people. Your window to the world has the curtains closed and it looks like nobody is home.

We live in an omni-channel world now and smart companies focus on three channels which they think are the best fit for their product or service.  That’s invariably Google through Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimisation mingled in with a bit of Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok or the silly named X.  Unless you have too much time on your hands, three channels should do the trick and some of the content can be used across the different platforms with a bit of appropriate reformatting here and there.

But what happens if you don’t put the right amount of time into this? 

Well think of your businesses as a beautiful orchestra full of wind and string and almost certainly someone with a big triangle to thwack occasionally.  When you happen to meet people, you wax lyrical about your amazing product, your inspirational team, your vision for the future and how you’re going to conquer the world.   But unless you properly design your voice, you may as well be an orchestra playing to an empty theatre.  You may as well just go down the pub, sit at the bar and bore the barman rigid with it night after night.

So you fix this – you have a lovely, SEO savvy website, your LinkedIn posts are insightful and don’t just brag how bloody brilliant you are or how delighted you are about something.  You’ve worked out the difference between Reels and Stories on Instagram and there is someone in your team who actually understands how to post content properly.  All that work begins to pay off and people start engaging with your content, your followers grow, the campaigns gain traction – but that’s where the problems start.

In most businesses, there is a gap – we call it 'Sales Enablement’.

That gap exists in the netherworld between marketing and sales.  Either the sales capability isn’t geared up to deal with the planned (or sometimes unexpected) demand, or more commonly there is nobody to translate what you’re getting in from potential customer engagement to a qualified sales lead.  So your orchestra is playing its heart out, the noise is beautiful, people are flocking to hear more but you left the doors open and forgot to put anyone in the Box Office.

It's vital to bridge the gap between marketing and sales and data plays a key role in that.   We’re not talking about deluging people’s LinkedIn accounts with offers of sales leads (please, please stop sending those to us by the way) but it’s all about understanding what your customers and potential customers want to hear and using this information to continually reshape the songs that you’re playing.  There is lots of neat tech out there now which can help with this, but someone in your organisation needs to be responsible for bridging the gap between marketing and sales – MIND THE GAP.  And although tech is taking over the world, it’s not always the answer and it can go wrong.  If anyone in the UK has tried to use the O2 Arena App to actually go and see somebody playing real music, they will testify to it being an absolute crime to App-hood and the developers should be made to listen to Chas and Dave for a week non-stop.

Sales enablement is critical for growth.

Don’t just pump your noise into the market through a megaphone however beautiful the sounds may be.  Don’t hire a top salesperson and expect them to get you to the top of the charts just because they are a dab hand at playing the trombone.  Make sure someone is running the operations in the theatre, you’re playing music that people want to hear and when they boo or applaud then you’re listening. 

With proper sales enablement, the audience comes to you asking for more and you have the next performance not only ready for them, but the popcorn, Minstrels (other chocolate snacks are available), programmes and t-shirts ready for them to buy.  You’re giving people what they want and getting paid for it.  Without sales enablement you’re more likely to be flip flopping from Mozart one week to pop tribute acts the next (although we would recommend Spandau Barry the Tony Hadley impersonator) and serving up cheap, slimy nachos to the people that you worked so hard to pull in in the first place.  

Coleid helps its clients to make beautiful music and hit records – give us a call.