Introduction to baseball theory of marketing and sales

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Baseball provides a useful analogy for the process of marketing and selling goods and services. This article demonstrates a simple, memorable narrative you can use to explain the steps involved in getting your product into the hands of customers.

Like running the bases, there are four important milestones:

• Awareness (first base)
• Credibility (second base)
• Permission (third base)
• Closing (home plate)

In general, the first two steps of awareness and credibility fall into marketing activities, while the last two, permission and closing, are in the domain of sales. For this purpose, I am defining marketing as activities revolved around generating interest in the product and creating leads, while sales is the process of taking those leads and converting them into customers.

First base – creating awareness

The first step is creating awareness of your product. Before you go off buying a bunch of Google AdWords or spending money on Facebook ads, ask yourself some important questions first. Who is your target customer? What needs do they have that are not being met by existing solutions? How does your product solve those needs? What type of marketing messages are most likely to reach your target?

The answers to these questions help you identify what makes your product unique and valuable, and how to communicate that to your audience.

If you are building a health app for the Apple Watch then you probably want to focus on getting your app listed in the Apple Store. If you are building an enterprise software platform to help companies process payroll you probably want to target industry publications, blogs, HR trade shows and the like to get the word out.

Second base – building credibility

Once your target is aware your product exists and understands the value your product offers, the next step is building credibility. Why should your target buy from you versus a competitor?

Using our Apple Watch health app example from above, for a consumer product you can build credibility through positive user reviews of your product, or by demonstrating the popularity of your app as more people download and use it.

Demonstrating credibility selling into an enterprise can be more time consuming, but is often even more critical because of the frequently larger dollar amounts involved. Using our payroll software platform example, credibility could be shown through reference customers, having a short product demo video, or by having a feature set which demonstrates you really understand and solve the customer’s pain point.

Once you establish yourself as a credible solution in the eyes of your target you are in scoring position (baseball pun intended).

Third base – getting permission

Depending on what you are selling getting permission takes many different forms. The key is you want your target to take action. In our smartphone app example, permission could be the user installing the free version of your app on their phone to test it out.

In our enterprise payroll platform example, a natural permission point would be using the software to run a trial payroll. Permission is important because only with an actual live installation can customers truly understand the value of the solution. No amount of demos or slide decks can match that.

Home plate – closing

Once you have successfully made the market aware your product exists, demonstrated credibility, and gotten enough interest from the target for them to take some action, all that is left is closing the deal.

In our freemium phone app example, closing the deal could mean upgrading to a premium version which unlocks additional value adding features. For our enterprise software example, closing the deal means converting the customer from free trial or demo account to paying subscriber. Consider using additional tools like support, training or professional services to assist in reaching a successful closing, as these extra provide additional value-add to the customer.

Conclusion

Next time someone asks you how you plan to market and sell your product make sure you are achieving these four steps: awareness, credibility, permission, and closing. Where does this model fall short? What are some other types of sales processes this analogy could be applied to? What are other ways to build awareness and credibility? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.