In football, the Red Zone is the last 20 yards a team must cross to reach their goal and get points on the scoreboard.

Marketing gets you into your revenue Red Zone.  Getting people to know, like and trust you is not enough to generate revenues — but it sure puts you in an excellent position to do so.

Once you’re in a position to score (or, sell), your focus turns from marketing to selling.

“Ya Gotta Have a System to Sell”
Here’s another way to look at things.  Let’s say you fly from London to New York and have a ‘picture perfect’ flight until . . . you’re about  50 feet above the runway at JFK when your pilot loses control and crashes. It matters not how good the flight was before your landing. The entire flight is still a total loss. No matter what else you do, if you don’t sell effectively, you lose!

Systems and Procedures . . . Systems and Procedures
Once you’re in the Revenue Red Zone, you’re at the point in the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass where you can leverage the know, like and trust you’ve developed to make an offer to a well-qualified prospect.

Early stage prospects may give you a ‘try’ with offers involving no-cost and no-risk.  As prospects become better qualified, your offers can be for low-cost, low-risk ways to use your services.

Later stage prospects, who really know, like and trust you are your best candidates for significant purchases.

Selling is to Marketing . . . as Marriage is to Dating
You won’t marry everyone you date.  And, you won’t sell everyone to whom you market your services. But once you convert a prospect into a client, you can leverage that relationship to generate a number of transactions with your client over time. That’s the basis for what we call ‘lifetime value’ — the sum total of all the transactions a client relationship offers you over time.

KEY POINT:
Selling is a revenue-related function no less important than other aspects of your marketing system.  It deserves an equally sound systematic approach to be effective.