Le basi del business: brand, product, marketing, sales and delivery on one sheet of paper

What a company is

These are the things you need to know to run a company, the basics, drawn on a sheet of paper. A company develops around a brand. In Italy the brand necessarily has to be premium or luxury, meaning aspirational, a dream: premium brands and luxury brands sell a dream and are part of the high end. The market is made up of three segments: the mass product, probably made in Eastern Europe or China; the mid-market product, where many Italian companies manufacture; and the high end, premium and luxury, which is where you need to go. Inside the company there is of course administration, finance and a management team that develops a business plan: we take that for granted.

The product

After the brand comes the product: a brand and then a product to sell on the market, or several products organised into collections. Let's say my product is a kitchen. The product is what I need in order to receive money from the customer: its job is to exchange money with the customer. How do you take the product to sale?

The marketing and advertising team

The first thing is to organise a marketing and advertising team, which has to build a machine based on social media, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google, to keep the brand present in the life of the customer and the potential customer. The ultimate goal of marketing and advertising is to bring in qualified contacts, through a funnel divided into several steps, interactions, lead generation, appointment, all the way to the sale: first name, surname, email, phone number. Contacts who already know the company, its collections and its products, and have fallen in love with them because the company is everywhere in the customer's life.

The sales team

The contact passes to the sales team. Today, with Covid-19, the sales team can no longer travel to meet customers, and customers aren't receiving suppliers and agents because there is a pandemic under way; buying behaviour will be heavily changed in the future too, even once a cure is found. Today's sales team necessarily has to sell by phone. As an entrepreneur I build a sales team, and I handle the first sales myself, personally: marketing is beautiful and makes people dream, sales is battle and blood, and as entrepreneurs we have to get back to selling.

Phone sales are built on a script, which can have two, three or four stages depending on how complex the business is. I listen to market feedback, change the script, listen again, change it again, endlessly: today's script won't be the one in six months, in a year or in five years, because market feedback changes it. The phone sale can then lead to a video conference, on Zoom or Skype, to create emotional engagement with the customer by looking them in the eye. The sales team is paid a fixed salary plus a percentage of sales, higher or lower depending on the quality of the marketing machine and the reliability of the brand and the product: fixed plus commission.

How do you measure all this? With a CRM that tracks conversion rates. The conversion rate tells you how sustainable the advertising campaign is in terms of margin: if I convert 30% of contacts at a certain value, I have a margin on that value, and knowing how much I paid per contact I know whether the campaign is sustainable in future or needs updating.

The delivery team and after-delivery

From the sales team the order passes to the delivery team, which goes beyond the old purchasing office and covers purchasing, production, warehouse and delivery. You have people who buy the materials, coordinate production or the warehouse where you physically hold the product, and deliver. After delivery there are two things to do. Immediately, straight away, photos, videos and testimonials from the customer, because they are emotionally engaged in the post-purchase phase: these are for external communication, which the marketing team will manage with new campaigns to bring in new target customers. After six months, a satisfaction survey, to use the customer's opinion of the product's quality in internal communication and to improve the product itself.

These are the basics of business you need to know. Once you know these five things, you don't need anything else.