back to: "The eight steps to marketing heaven"

How it works

The market development process helps generate the well-qualified list in a top-down way. The sales pipeline process uses the list to identify, qualify and progress sales leads. It also feeds into the list in a bottom-up way, starting from existing customers. (See:- our unique approach.)

You don't need to have completed the market development process to start the sales pipeline, but in our experience most hi-tech SMEs have done little or nothing on "market development", which often explains why they are having difficulty getting orders..

What do I do now?

Read about each of these and then ask yourself:

• Which tasks am I doing now?
• Which tasks am I not doing at all?
• Where do I need to focus to improve?

You also might need to study our small business growth model. This is important because it explicitly identifies and separates business development from business operations. This will allow you to relate marketing to the other functions in a business. It might even encourage you to make the time to do the business development tasks you know you should have been doing all along...! Remember:-

• The market development process is part of business development
• The sales pipeline process is part of business operations
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