Rural Entrepreneurship Workshop - Day 2: Marketing & Sales

Rural Entrepreneurship Course: Day 2

 In the second edition of the Rural Entrepreneurship Course we introduced one of the most interesting topics for the participants and in many cases more difficult for them to develop: Marketing and sales.

The objective of this session was that at the end the entrepreneurs would have an understanding of the concepts of marketing and sales and how to apply them. 

Management and creation of a brand is one of the main skills an entrepreneur has to acquire to develop a successful business in the agri-food sector. 

During the first edition we have been working on two of the first key points of rural entrepreneurship; the value proposition of your business and how to define and identify your customer segment. The question we focused on now was: How to get your value proposition to your customer segment? 

In this step we identified two elements of marketing and sales. These two concepts are usually mixed and the steps that must be followed to develop an action plan for each of them are not very clear. The workshop we hosted explained and differentiated the two. 

Marketing

·      What is marketing and what elements does it have?

·      You can't talk about marketing without a brand

·      Brand management

·      What elements must my brand have in relation to my product?

·      Identifying communication channels

·      How to structure your marketing plan oriented to your brand?

Sales

·      What is the difference between marketing and sales?

·      What strategies are defined between these two concepts and the importance of separating these two strategies?

·      Elements in a sales plan

·      Pitch perfect: how to sell your product and improve your sales speech.

During the workshop we worked in depth on these concepts. Our insights we’d like to share:

- That the two concepts make no sense without a good brand approach to convey their value proposition;

- That marketing is brand communication and without it you cannot define a marketing plan;

- Sales is short term and is the result of a good long term marketing plan;

- A short and clear sales pitch is the best tool to complete the process.