Effective Sales and Marketing

The effectiveness of a company's marketing and sales functions have a major impact on growth and profitability. Well researched marketing and sales strategies, together with structured, effective and measurable sales processes are a real competitive advantage:

If you have a really effective marketing and sales function you will be able to answer "yes" to the following questions:

• Do you fully understand your total market, its size, segmentation and geography
• Can you and your staff articulate the key benefits of your product
• Do you have a researched and tested marketing strategy and plan
• Can you forecast sales accurately and reliably
• Do your staff have a written sales strategy and plan including sales targets, actions, timing and volumes
• Do you have a formal sales process - 'A Sales Machine' - that defines how to win business
• Do you have specific campaigns with targets for new business
• Do you have specific campaigns with targets for retaining current customers
• Do you use a range of marketing activities such as advertising, direct mail, email marketing and PR
• Do you have a website which is an active selling machine rather than an electronic brochure
• Does your website get it’s fair share of search engine traffic for your products or services
• Are you getting 1000+ visitors a week to your site
• Are you capturing email information from your site visitors and using that to sell to them
• Do you have full statistics on your website traffic
• Can you measure the return on investment from all your marketing activities
• Do you measure the response rates for all your marketing campaigns
• Are all your front line staff paid in relation to your sales
• Is the first question your staff ask on Monday “what were the sales for last week?”

Scoring

For every ‘yes’, give yourself 3 points and for a ‘no’, give yourself 0. Group your points together using the question colours. Add the scores for the BLUE questions and put them in box 1, put the Red total in box 2, the Green total in box 3, the Black total in box 4, and the Violet total in box 5.

 minimum 6 or click here                 minimum 6 or click here                          
 minimum 6 or click here
 minimum 3 or click here
 minimum 3 or click here
        

Results 

45 – 54   Congratulations. With your levels of planning and execution, your business must be growing quickly and efficiently. You plan well, using data as well as market knowledge. You have a good balance between recruiting new customers and keeping existing ones and you are using an extensive mix of techniques, online and offline, and you measure everything you do. Keep up the good work! 

36 – 42  Good score. At this level of sophistication, your business must be growing well. Look at the minimum scores in each of the sections. Are you weak in any particular one? Click on the link for that colour section to see what you can do to improve and drive your sales and profits harder. 

27 – 33 Not bad. You are probably focussing on some areas of marketing while other areas are underdeveloped. The good news is that that leaves a lot of room for growth potential. Take a look at the colour sections where you have room for improvement and click on the links to see what opportunities there are for you to take your marketing to the next level 

24 or less  Ok, so you are not a marketing guru, but you know someone who is. Take a look at the links opposite the sections where you are weakest to find suggestions for improving your marketing performance. However you could also do with some help in planning and coordinating your marketing. Call or email us today to set up an initial meeting. We will evaluate where we can help you and make you a proposal based on fixed fees and solid results – guaranteed!

Analysis

Planning

You scored lower than normal on marketing and sales planning. The key to consistent success is to know your market and you competition. I am not talking about long documents with lots of statistics. In fact I believe that plans are nothing but that planning is everything. No matter how small your business, you are exposed to more and more competition. You and your staff need to be clear how your competition is performing and to know how you plan to win business from them. The key to organising any business is a good sales forecast and without one, even the simplest decisions become difficult. A great sales plan is a real motivator for your staff and it puts you in real control of your business. You who will deliver what targets and you control the timing of campaigns to deliver the financial results that you have planned. These things do not come without a lot of effort and know-how.  Put some time aside for research into your customers and your competitors. With the internet, most of this can be dome from your desktop, but you must try to make sure that you think beyond the ones you already know about. Go over your product USP and make sure it is as valid as it was 12 months ago. Split your sales campaigns down into smaller steps, and define who in your sales team will do what and when. Make sure you agree any targets with them. If you would like some help in planning your sales and marketing activities, we can help. We implement winning plans in businesses every day and we are so confident in our abilities that we guarantee our work.
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Sales Execution

Few businesses have a really great sales machine. As a business grows it is difficult to adapt processes and systems to keep up with the business. But an efficient way of handling leads and converting them to sales is vital. Drop those general adverts, and only spend on campaigns that deliver directly measurable results. Ask new customers where they heard about you and if possible put special offer codes on adverts sop that you can track how they perform. Many businesses only spend marketing money on finding new customers and they neglect existing loyal customers. This is not an efficient way to invest your marketing funds. The right balance is critical to your profitability. Good marketing is always about a great mix of activities. Focussing on one or two ways of promoting your business limits the people you reach and has a poor balance between investing in short-term results at the expense of your long-term business wellbeing. Think about each of these elements and build them into a revised marketing plan. I promise you, the effect on your business growth will be worth the effort. If you do not have the experience or the resources to work on these areas, we have many years experience of doing so and can help. Click here to get in touch.

Web/Ecommerce

Nothing separates businesses more than their performance on the web. While it appears that many companies have a web presence, very few do a lot of business online. Creating a strong selling website is quite a specialist skill, and optimising a site to get lots of search engine traffic is even more complex. Unless you are an expert, you will need help in this area. A lot of companies have already exhausted the skills of their web designer and yet are no closer to building that web selling machine. The key to success is to combine your knowledge of your customers and markets, with the knowledge of ecommerce experts, who know how to trade successfully in this medium. For the first element you most arm yourself with the basic knowledge of what it takes to succeed. At the end of this section you can click for an article describing the basics of a successful trading website. Then you need to find experts with a deep knowledge of this subject. We would love to work with you on your project and are so confident is our ability to help, that we will guarantee our results. Click here to contact us for an initial discussion. Click here for the web article.

Measuring Results

Effective marketing for most businesses is built around a combination of planning and executing compelling campaigns that achieve directly measurable results. Knowing what business contribution each campaign bring to the business puts you in control. You have the right balance of investment between new and existing customer campaigns and you know which combination of marketing tools gives you the best return on your investment.
There are several articles on marketing measurement in our library. If you want advice on your specific situation contact us here and we will be pleased to help.

Staff Motivation

Unless your frontline staff are clear about their role in making sales and keeping customers, then you will loose opportunities to win business. The best sales organisations are very consistent in their focus on sales. It is the first and last thing that they talk about and every other discussion in the business takes place against this backdrop. Everyone in the organisation is completely focussed on sales and customers. As the expression goes "if you are not supporting a customer, support someone who is supporting one. Very few organisations achieve this clarity in their objectives, but those that do are the top performers in their markets. Think your objectives, your measures and your pay structure and see if there are ways that you could emulate this single mindedness. If you would like further information on how this can be achieved, contact us here for more information.