Marketing is great, but it's only effective when paired with a solid sales strategy

I’ve built and launched Clippulse about 3 months ago. Usually, all this time, I’ve been going head-in first, without actually researching and planning out the next steps. Unfortunately, I can’t help but notice that it gets worse before it’s going to get better.

Those are the most important stats for each month so far:

June: 1.2k visitors, 85 signups, $264 revenue, $0 MRR (Pre-Sales included)
July: 2k visitors, 291 signups, $83 revenue, $0MRR (PH launch month)
August: 858 visitors, 65 signups, $96 revenue, $29 MRR

Some might say that August wasn’t that good because I wasn’t doing enough marketing. But that’s wrong.

August was about 95% marketing and 5% coding.

I’ve tried multiple strategies during this month:

• Started working on SEO
• Created a free tool
• Started exploring and sharing videos for different use cases

So, not doing marketing wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that while I was heavily focused on marketing, I wasn't focusing enough on sales activities that could convert this interest into revenue.

Looking at the number of accounts and the revenue for each month, one of the obvious issues is converting free users to paying customers. Since they signed up, they must have been interested, or at least curious. But never ended up paying for the product. The way I see it, there are three possible reasons for this:

1. The product is not good enough to make people pay for it.
2. The product is too complicated to use.
3. Wrong monetization plan.

Unfortunately, without talking to the customers directly, there is no way to know which of those is the actual issue (or maybe there is something else). But instead of trying to figure this one out, I’ve been focusing on SEO and bringing more traffic - which didn’t work out very well either, but I won’t go into that now.

A naive approach here would be to just keep focusing on getting more traffic, ignoring the sales aspect, and hoping that some of those people will pay for the product. Even if I manage to get 500 users to sign up in the next month and out of those, just 5 become paying customers, I'm missing out on 495 people who were interested enough to create an account. That's a clear sign that a sales strategy is needed alongside marketing. Otherwise, it would be a continuous struggle

It doesn’t matter how much marketing effort I put in to generate interest if my sales strategy isn't strong enough to convert that interest into revenue. So, I gave it a lot of thought and created a simple framework to help me identify whether I should be focusing on marketing or sales activities:

Of course, it's not that simple. Marketing and sales are both complex and they both require different strategies. But doing marketing without a concrete sales strategy to turn that interest into revenue is like cooking a meal but never serving it.