Getting older has both benefits and detriments.

Growing old means having another day to learn, live, love, and grow. If you choose to continue to learn every day, you acquire wisdom. That wisdom may or may not help you become more successful, but I find, to stay relevant in business, you have to continue to follow trends and learn from experts who may be both younger and older than you!

The detriment comes from your body aging. You can control some things, like exercise, eating healthy, and getting enough sleep. However, no matter what you do, aches, pains, injuries, and degeneration are inevitable.

I have arthritis in my spine and my right big toe. At the beginning of this year, I started having almost debilitating back pain. I remember my father had the same when he was my age or younger, which may be hereditary. It really hampered my ability to exercise and even sleep sometimes.

The EXPERTS

I have been quite active in my health and have seen a slew of doctors over the years. I have a general practitioner, cardiologist, gastroenterologist, and the occasional visit to a dermatologist, dentist, ophthalmologist, and others. Each has a specialty and is an expert in their area of medicine. If all that sounds expensive, it is. However, the alternatives can be more detrimental and way more expensive.

With my back pain, the general practitioner sent me to a radiologist to take an x-ray and confirm the spinal arthritis (but that was old news). They then recommended physical therapy. I have learned over the years that getting a second opinion is always a good idea, so I chose to try a chiropractor before I went down the physical therapy road (been there, done that).

The chiro said, “It was not skeletal but muscular,” and recommended a few exercises I could do myself, along with more visits to them to correct other issues. As I started doing those, it got better but more acute. I noticed that the pain originated in my hip. I self-discovered I had sciatica (a pinched nerve that causes pain elsewhere). The chiro was confused because sciatica normally goes from the back to the leg, but I had no leg pain. I was given a couple more exercises and told to try a massage gun on my hip. Both helped.

Finally, I realized that the arthritis in my foot was causing me to walk differently, which caused pressure on my hip. I started to massage the foot and work at walking straighter, and both almost 100% solved the issue (it still flares, but I know how to massage and stretch it out).

I am not sure if physical therapy would have been better, but there was a bit of soul-searching and gut feeling that I believe helped me get to the root cause faster and gave me a faster (and certainly less expensive) road to recovery.

The EXPERTS (Part 2)

When it comes to marketing, I think we need a team of specialists to help us deal with what ails our business pain. Often, what is diagnosed as a lack of traffic to a website is actually caused by a process associated with the end goal… producing more sales.

More traffic should logically generate more sales, like physical therapy should have helped my back. But if I had gone to work on my back, I may or may not have found that my foot arthritis was causing the nerve pinching in my hip, which was the root cause of my back pain.

If you only look at traffic to your website, you may try to employ an SEO person to diagnose the lack of traffic. They can certainly fix your SEO, which should increase traffic, but will it increase the right traffic of people who need what you sell, or just increase the number of people who price shop or research without actually buying what you are selling?

The other option is to find a Google Ad (or other SEM) specialist. They can help find keywords and phrases to create ads that drive more traffic to your website. But will this increase the right traffic of people who need what you sell, or just the number of people who now know your company exists and fill out your online form to sell you?

Don't get me wrong. I am an advocate of SEO and SEM. Like my prescription for physical therapy, it usually takes a bit of soul-searching and gut feeling to get to the root cause of your leads' lack of increase.

The CARE Team

One issue with healthcare is you see a bunch of doctors. They take notes and fill them into a database. Then, the other doctors can read the notes and do their best to interpret the meaning behind the entries. Rarely do they ever get on the phone or an online meeting to collaborate. Each acts like an informed silo.

Marketing (like healthcare) may become disconnected and even redundant if you work with multiple individuals (or only one or two). Just as sales rely on good marketing, your website visitors rely on quality information that is easy to find and navigate. Finally, you want to capture as much data about who is visiting and where they are going as possible.

You want to create a team to manage your website's user experience and interface, content creation, and data capture. Then, you need another team to manage content distribution, such as email, social media, and video sharing. Finally, you want them all to be managed by a high-level C.A.R.E. team that manages the messaging to and from your sales team, which helps everyone present consistent messaging and a quality company brand.

C.A.R.E.

• Collaborative – Share insights and best practices while utilizing the latest trends
• Aligned – Working together to ensure consistency and cohesive messaging
• Responsive – Willing to react to new information from other teams' actions
• Engaged – Takes action and provides effective, measurable results

Whether you assemble an in-house team, create a hybrid with contractors, or hire a complete agency solution, all parties involved must have a common goal based on your desired main result. If you want more leads but your sales team and process are focused on repeat business, there will be a disconnect.

My sciatica had a team, but the disconnect was that none of the medical teams were actively aligned. It's like the old saying… “When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I had to be my own C.A.R.E. team leader to get the care I needed to solve my actual problem.

Closing Thought

Health (and sales) only come to mind when there is an issue. We all want to find that miracle cure that solves the issue and makes it go away and get better. The challenge becomes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!” Often, it takes multiple activities, solutions, and groups to create a cohesive solution to a complex problem.

I think we can agree that when you solve one problem, another is often around the corner. Joy in the good times can be dampened by the bad, but once you taste joy, you work hard to regain that feeling! It starts with knowing what you want to achieve and why, not just throwing money at solutions that don't find and fix the root cause.

I totally appreciate what my medical team was trying to do, and I wanted to make it easier and better for everyone. To do that, I needed to lead my C.A.R.E. team (as you might want to do for yours)!

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Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about business-to-business sales and marketing today! Do you have a sales or marketing communications strategy that works for you? What tips or techniques can you share that work for you and your business?

To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at The Bacon Podcast.