Recently, I met Fred. I like him; he’s chatty and frank. Unfortunately, he’s also struggling like a lot of surveyors.

Fred made over £1 million in revenue this year – with less than a 1% profit margin. He’s burnt out and understandably frustrated. Can you imagine how many hours he’s invested to bring that million in?

He’s spent a fortune on expensive survey equipment so he can keep up with industry trends. He’s got a team to pay. But he’s had to lower his prices to stay competitive in his market. And he’s doing all the back-office work himself to keep his business afloat.

Busting his balls is having a knock-on effect on Fred.

Do all surveyors bust their balls in this manner?

Are you all working like maniacs to reap so little reward from all that effort? I think many of you do.

Here’s why: You, like Fred, are great at the work of surveying, but you’re not clued up on how to run a business profitably.

Not that Fred’s dumb. He’s not, and neither are you. He just lacks the business acumen to support his passion and turn it into money. It’s a different skill set – and it can be learned. The keys? Sales and marketing.

Working with surveyors and equipment manufacturers around the globe has given me a unique perspective on how businesses are run within the geospatial realm. What I see is a lack of understanding around sales and marketing, and often an alarming lack of concern – or even an all-out disparagement – for these two critical functions.

In Fred’s case, there was no disrespect for sales and marketing, just a bit of misunderstanding around their roles and significance.

The function of marketing

I explained to Fred the function of marketing, and he had a genuine light bulb moment:

“So, Marketing gets leads for sales?”

“Yes,” I responded.

“Then what does sales do?” he asked.

“Sales turns the lead into money,” I told him.

“How does all this work, then?” he asked

Here’s what I told him: Marketing’s role is to open the door for sales. It’s about getting to the sale as fast as possible. At the end of the day, it’s about the revenue.

It all starts with marketing. Marketing owns the early stages of the buyer’s journey – it creates leads that will eventually go to sales. (See the graphic below!)
Marketing is responsible for identifying the right audience – your target audience – and communicating a message to them, consistently and frequently.
Marketing’s role is to create Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) among your target audience, ultimately generating new leads for sales.
Marketing is more than social media. Please do not hire a person just to create social media posts for you – there’s so much more to marketing than that! Social is just one tiny piece.

Marketing and sales are closely related but they’re not the same – and they need to work together to make a business successful.

If you think about how a customer decides to make a purchase – especially a higher-ticket purchase – it’s not usually something that happens quickly. With B2B purchases in particular (for example, purchases from geospatial businesses) these decisions can take six weeks (or more!) to make, and they often involve quite a few people.

Marketing owns up to 80% of that decision-making process. It’s marketing’s role to understand what the customer needs, and then make them aware of how your service can meet that need.

(We would actually consider this a Buyer’s Journey, not a Customer Journey but we’ll discuss that in a later post! Image source)

Marketing may use research to really understand the audience’s concerns, then create campaigns and content that help educate them about why your solution is the best solution. Essentially, marketing needs to find the audience, communicate the value of your offering, and then engage with potential customers via email, social media, advertising and other channels – and get the audience “warm” enough for sales to take over.

Sales is then responsible for actually closing the deal.

Sales deals directly with the customer and handling late-stage communications, like price negotiations, product or service demos, or creating a proposal. Their role is converting the lead or prospect into a sale.

Here’s an example of how this should work, but often falls apart: Marketing hosts a webinar and invites your target audience to attend. The webinar is designed to highlight whatever it is your business does better than anyone.

50 people attended the webinar, and these are now warm leads. They were interested enough to sign up and sit through an hour of your great content.

But so many of you won’t follow up on these leads! You let them go cold and even die instead of sending them a follow-up email or two, or calling after the webinar to see how they liked it.

Those leads need follow-up! Send them a few emails in the weeks following the webinar. Send a link to the webinar playback, a check-in to see what they’d like the next webinar to be, an offer to meet for a consultation. But follow up!

Ideally, marketing handles the follow-up and then hands the warm leads off to sales for a more personalized touch-point. With a proper follow-up, those 50 webinar leads could lead to new contracts for your geospatial business.

Do you see how you’re making things harder for yourself?

Stop doing that! There are lots of ways to improve your business operations, but handling sales and marketing properly will deliver the biggest bang for your buck in the shortest time. You can watch this case study to see how it can make a difference.

And if you want to start handling marketing and sales better in-house, reach out to us to learn more about The Geospatial Marketing Academy and get yourself – and your team – trained so you can elevate your game.

Harrogate (UK), 14 June 2018 – Elaine Ball Technical Marketing, backed by a group of corporate geospatial sponsors, has released the third in a series of GetKidsIntoSurvey posters designed to help businesses and educationalists encourage more children and young people to take up surveying as a career. The campaign takes a strategic, long-term approach to tackling the severe global skills shortage in surveying.

The latest poster, featuring a ‘Smart Cities’ scene, was launched at the TopoDOT User Conference, Orlando, and Geobusiness, London, last month. Like the two preceding GetKidsIntoSurvey posters, ‘Smart Cities’ is a busy, colourful illustrated scene (A1/US Standard 24×36) designed to get children thinking about how we measure our environment. It’s packed with interesting things to find while showcasing some of the amazing jobs surveyors do.

Featured in all the posters are Professor Topo, Geo Ginger, Evan the Eagle and cute little TopoDOG. In ‘Smart Cities’, they show how surveyors use specialist technology and skills to find underground cables, monitor train tracks, measure heights, map streets, and visualise the inside of buildings. This latest edition includes a series of questions to encourage children to explore the scene, discuss it and learn about surveying – such as: “Spot the yellow ground-penetrating radar – what do you think it does?”

Illinois-based Timothy Burch, director of surveying at SPACECO Inc and secretary of the USA’s National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS), says of GetKidsIntoSurvey: “I was fortunate to be exposed to surveying early in my life. But for those who are searching for a great career with huge potential, look no further!”

The campaign is aimed at children aged 8-12, but the poster series is equally suitable for teenagers and adults – and can help surveyor parents explain what they do all day! The posters are being marketed to survey firms who will use them to engage with children and young people through schools and local groups. They are also available directly to teachers (particularly geographers) and careers professionals.

‘Smart Cities’ can be ordered online at http://getkidsintosurvey.com in single quantities up to 10 or in packs of 20, with larger volumes available on request. The NSPS will be distributing the posters in the USA/Canada, with Elaine Ball Technical Marketing handling shipping to the rest of the world. Educationalists can access the posters for free and need only pay for delivery. For anyone else, the cost is £1 per A1 poster (plus delivery). The money raised through the sale of the posters is being re-invested in a series of future aids to get children and young people interested in surveying as a career.

The next poster, due for release in Q3 2018, will be entitled ‘Mining Australia’ and will be based on Kalgoorlie Super Pit Gold Mine. The campaign can also be followed at @get_kids_into_survey (Instagram ), @GetKidsintoSurv (Twitter), and @getkidsintosurvey (Facebook).

The #GetKidsIntoSurvey campaign was first launched in November 2017 (with a print run of just 500 ‘English countryside’ posters). It immediately took off on social media, revealing a considerable appetite among survey firms to create a wider future candidate pool. Another poster quickly followed, entitled ‘Antarctica’, featuring underwater drones, hand-held scanners and surveys of the ocean floor.

Get your poster today! Click here!

– Ends –

Hi everyone!

Like Motorbikes? Like the Isle of Man TT? Like lasers? Last week I went over to the Isle of Man for the TT motor bike racing, and it was just incredible!

The Isle of Man TT is the world’s ultimate road race. Not only is the Isle of Man a beautiful place to be but the racing is fierce and the atmosphere is vibrant, in such an environment it’s hard not to think of the marketing side of it all. Watch a summary of what I got up to here!

Until next time…

Elaine

Hello everyone!

In this week’s VLOG we are delighted to announce the release of our new Get Kids Into Survey poster, Smart Cities! Our new poster has a lot more detail and brand new characters such as Draeko the Dragon sponsored by Leica, our duelling cowboys Phil-Fedor from Bowman Consulting and Robert Martin from NEI GPS as well as Steven Van Duffelen from Geoslam as a viking, Piggle Wiggle the TopoDOT dog, Evan the Eagle from NSPS and Helen Gilmartin from KOREC!

The posters are now available to buy from our website for just £1 plus shipping and all proceeds go right back into the Get Kids Into Survey campaign, so not only are your posters fun and educational but they’re doing good for the industry too!

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me via the details here.

Until next time! Elaine

Hey everyone,

Welcome to part two of my Florida trip VLOG. I check in two days just before the TUC 2018 conference in Orlando Florida where the guys were busy packing boxes and finalising presentations. With 211 attendees this year we were in for a busy time at the conference with lots of technical sessions and workshops.

My Get Kids Into Survey “Smart Cities” poster was ready and printed in time for the show, a BIG thank you to all our wonderful sponsors of the posters for making this happen and helping grow the future generation of surveyors.

From the TopoDOT user conference get a glimpse of all the action fro the ground with a behind-the-scenes look at seminars, drone footage and all the parties!

Elaine

#DiaryofaGeospatialMarketer

Catch up on all my other VLOGS here!

Hello everyone,

It’s been a busy time here at EBTM, with a recent trip to Florida for the the TUC 2018 conference.

As some of you know I do a weekly VLOG on what EBTM gets up to in the Geospatial Marketing Industry. I am literally two weeks behind on this TopoDOT User Conference (#TUC18) VLOG however thanks to the awesome Hannah Cotterell, my videographer, here are the results!

This is part one of two videos. I would like to send a BIG thank you to Brett Wood, PSM Florida Department of Transportation for some brilliant ideas for my TUC talk! And P.S. Robert Martin, I’m keeping my eye on you and our content marketing, keep up the good work.

Check out my other VLOGS and get all the latest on book reviews, content marketing tips and the latest on what’s going on in the Geospatial industry here.

Elaine #DiaryofaGeospatialMarketer

What an awesome few days at GEO Business 2018, here is my round up from the event! Sending out a big thank you to Versha Carter Caroline Hobden and team for a brilliant show!

#geospatial #Geobiz

Elaine

Hello everyone,

This week we have BIG NEWS PEOPLE!

The National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) are onboard with #GetKidsintoSurvey. A huge thank you to Timothy Burch Trisha Milburn and team! Get the scoop on my up and coming talk at TUC, the TopoDOT user conference in Orlando next month where I will be delving into internal communications and breaking down silos .This week we have two awesome book recommendations along with all the other crazy things we have been up to. A big thank you to Hannah Cotterell for her awesome video editing!

I would love to hear from you on what you would like me to share in the next few weeks? What questions do you have a from a geospatial sales and marketing perspective? We’d love to hear from you!

P.S. Can you spot some of my crazy sayings! #SurveyLife #GeospatialMarketing

Until next week… Elaine.

April 20th 2018

SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING! It involves National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) but you will have to wait!

We’ve purchased a new camera! Today we’re shooting this VLOG on the Canon EOS 750, it’s taken some getting used to but we love it so far.

This week Elaine talks about the importance of planning with content calendars, getting out of information silos and thinking ahead. Find out who is using content well and utilising LinkedIn to get the message out there. We talk about what’s working and what could be done better, being consistent with your message and your brand.

Get the latest on Elaine’s up and coming talks for the TopoDOT user conference in Orlando which will focus on internal communications and selling.

Get your latest book recommendation! This week Elaine recommends Brandscaping by Andrew Davis.

We give an update on our Get Kids into Survey campaign, which is taking off! Revealing more changes to the poster including new characters and the fresh Smart Cities design, with a big shout out to our great new sponsors!

Oh and at some point we have Harry Potter’s Nimbus 2000 turn up, it’s all go in this weeks VLOG, check it out here.