The Roadmap to Revenue: Building Your Sales & Marketing System
In my last article, we explored why Canadian businesses must stop treating sales and marketing (M&S) as afterthoughts, especially in our apparent post-globalization, tariff-laden landscape. But knowing you need a strategy isn’t the same as building one. And having a great product doesn’t mean your customer is ready to buy.
In this piece, we shift from “why” to “how,” mapping out the key steps to building a repeatable, customer-aligned system that’s ready for both local and international competition.
An Important Question: What Does the Buyer Believe They Need?
In Conceptual Selling, we’re taught to uncover the customer’s concept—that is, their thinking about their problems, and how they believe they should be solved. That belief governs every decision they’ll make.
Depending on your product or service offering, the customer’s concept will vary. But let’s use a Canadian-made hearing aid preparing for international expansion as an example:
A Canadian senior may think: “I just want to hear my grandkids clearly again.”
A rural health worker in Jamaica may think: “I need something affordable and durable that I can explain in five minutes.”
A caregiver in Brazil may think: “I’m overwhelmed. I want the ability for my loved one and I to communicate clearly again”
Before building a system, we must ask: Are we organizing around our needs, or theirs?
Sales & Marketing 101:The Roadmap to Revenue Begins with Listening
Sales and marketing systems often fail because they’re built around internal processes, not customer conversations. To co-create value with your customer, your system must map to the way they discover, consider, decide, and act. That means structuring your team, tools, and tactics around where they are in their thinking, who is involved in their decision, and what risks they see in choosing you.
Getting this structure right isn’t rocket science, but it’s close. For Canadian B2Bs especially, understanding the fundamentals of listening serves as the foundation to compete beyond the U.S. and win in Europe, Africa or the Caribbean, where relationship management is key. Broadly speaking these fundamentals are:
Lead Generation: The process of identifying potential clients.
Lead Nurturing: The process of building relationships through targeted communication.
A Sales Funnel: Structuring the journey from initial interest to loyal customer.
CRM & Analytics: Leveraging software, including AI, to monitor, manage, and optimize your customer interactions.
Lead Generation: Where Does the Conversation Begin?
Lead Generation is the process of identifying, and eventually converting possible customers. Applied with precision it goes a step further, helping you understand where conversations with prospects should begin. Any effective strategy starts with making use of basic tools with intentionality. For our Canadian hearing aid company, this might look like:
A Website: Inclusive of an online store to facilitate ecommerce, and quality educational content speaking to the life moments when hearing loss becomes real;
SEO: So said quality content can be found organically on the web;
Social Media: To communicate with your prospects where they spend much of their time;
A CRM: To keep track of your engagements with prospects and to run marketing campaigns; and
Digital Advertising: To fast-track the customer acquisition process by finding the prospect in the right place at the right time.
And any tool used should offer robust analytics, or enable analytics through 3rd-party solutions. Keep in mind that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. If these key elements are already in place, conduct an internal audit to assess how your existing sales and marketing operations measure up to industry standards. According to Collibra’s 2020 report on data intelligence adoption, companies putting data at the centre of their decision-making were 58% more likely to surpass their revenue goals.
Lead Nurturing: Earning the Right to Continue the Dialogue
Email marketing is a key tool as well, but too many companies think “lead nurturing” means sending ever more emails. In conceptual selling, we earn permission to proceed by staying relevant to the buyer's evolving concept. For the caregiver overwhelmed by options, that might mean a call from a knowledgeable rep who doesn’t pitch, but asks questions and listens carefully, or a short video from a past customer who once felt the same, and now feels confident.
For the community health worker, it could mean a low-bandwidth WhatsApp message in their language, explaining how the device works and how to explain it to others.
Regardless of the prospect, understanding who you’re selling to and what matters to them enables you to tailor your message accordingly. Your CRM, social media and email marketing platforms should help facilitate, working hand in glove to respond to the buyer’s journey. HubSpot’s Global Marketing Trends Report 2024 found that 53% of marketers decisions are influenced by analytics to improve ROI. Canadian firms would do well to follow suit, defining clear, compelling value propositions that resonate both locally and globally.
Your Funnel Guides Your Partnership Path
The classic funnel—awareness, interest, decision—is still valid. But in Conceptual Selling, we reframe it:
Rather than pushing the prospect in the sales process forward, we move alongside them—step by step.
For some companies, a three step funnel is completely valid. For others with more complex sales cycles, six or seven steps may be more appropriate. Regardless of the structure you choose, your funnel should enable clear insight into your customer journey. Let’s reimagine the funnel for our hearing aid company using four simple stages:
Example Sales Funnel for Canadian Hearing Aid Company, by Vermont Strategies | 28 March 2025
Keep in mind that in emerging markets, that path might be shorter, but that doesn’t make it simpler. You may have one shot to build trust. Your system must reflect that reality.
CRM & Analytics: A Palantir in a Dashboard
The right CRM and analytical software can dramatically amplify your effectiveness. Pipeline’s 2023 CRM Survey points out that 43% of respondents say they’re more likely to select a vendor if they have a favourable impression when meeting with the sales reps. Another study claims 59% of customers consider tailored engagement as the crucial key to gaining their attention. If your CRM can’t tell you where in the journey a customer is and how to make the best impression, it’s not working. And if your team doesn’t trust the data, it doesn’t matter.
The CRM should mirror the questions your customer is asking:
What do they care about right now?
Who else is influencing this decision?
What risks are they weighing?
Train your team to use the CRM as a map as opposed to a database.
AI is a game-changing tool used by effective companies the world over. The challenge is securing the right, cost-effective AI for the right purpose—with trustworthy outputs. Platforms such as EHCOnomics’ ARTI (Artificial Recursive Tesseract Intelligence) Assistant solves this challenge through its fractal-based intelligence, learning you and your team’s rhythm to adapt to workflows bringing real-time, role-specific intelligence—virtually free of hallucinations. It also natively connects to tools like Google, Slack, Salesforce, or any other platform in your stack so you gain real-time insights through one simple interface.
From Activity to System, from System to Scale
Too many companies operate on hope: hope that the next campaign works, hope that a rep hits quota, hope that the product will “sell itself.” But hope isn’t a system.
Building a sales and marketing system means taking ownership of the full buyer journey from the first click, to the final handshake, and doing it in a way that’s repeatable, measurable, and scalable. It requires listening deeply, aligning often, and committing to the slow work of earning trust at every step.
For Canadian businesses aiming to compete globally, the challenge is finding ways to drive profitable partnerships. The good news? Systems scale. Hype doesn’t.
So ask yourself: Are we selling, or are we building scalable systems for recurring revenue?
Because in 2025, the companies who will win are those who listen better, align faster, and deliver consistent results.
Your roadmap to revenue is waiting. All that’s left… is to start.
