Not sure where to start when it comes to creating a successful sales and marketing strategy to help grow your business?
When it comes to creating a successful sales and marketing strategy, it can be difficult to know where to start. Trying to wade through the noise of new digital trends and technology, performance metrics and general pressure to outperform competitors and create a strategy that will show ROI can be a real challenge. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of 9 useful tips that will provide real value generation when it comes to developing a sales and marketing strategy.
Budget For Results
Make sure you’ve allocated enough resources to reach your company’s goals. Ultimately, the size of your marketing budget will dictate how much you can invest and how quickly you’ll see results. You may have big dreams for your marketing strategy, but if you don’t back it up with a sufficient budget, you’ll see a drop in your marketing efficiency and you (and your team) will be disappointed by the results.
Revise Your Ideal Customer Profile and Personas
When it comes to developing a solid sales strategy, it’s worth doing some digging on your current customers. What makes your best customers profitable? What do you enjoy about working with them? Create an ideal customer profile and buyer personas, and make sure they are accurate so that the information driving your sales funnel expansion is as detailed and targeted as possible.
Record Your Buyer’s Journey
When you’ve nailed down your buyer personas, you can then document the journey each persona takes to becoming a customer. Plotting every interaction point a buyer will have with your company can really catalyse the transformation of your sales and marketing capabilities, as it will provide your sales team with valuable information that can be baked straight into your sales strategy.
Start at the end, just before signing a contract with your company, and look at the step before that, and the one before that, and so on. At each point, identify the persona’s questions, motivations and any potential issues. Then you can determine and innovate new content that will engage them at each point in the buyer’s journey. Don’t forget to create CTAs to guide them through each step in the journey.
Highlight Your Differences
What makes you different from your competitors? These differentiators are your greatest selling points, so you need to find out why your customers choose to buy from you and what could encourage them to leave you for a competitor. One simple way to boost marketing performance is to be consistently emphasising your company’s unique qualities through different sales and marketing channels.
Review and Organise Your Marketing Materials
Your printed and digital marketing materials should be developed to attract your ideal customers. Ensure copyright dates are revised and that style guidelines are being followed and confirm that everyone on your sales team is using the right version. These seemingly small details will help maintain consistent brand performance.
Revise Your Website and Online Marketing
Are your website and social media channels designed to attract the right personas? To increase marketing efficiency, your branding and messaging need to be consistent and targeted, so that you’re able to engage the right audience with interesting and educational content.
Assess and Document Your Sales Process
For maximum sales efficiency, everyone on your sales team needs to be following the same process for attracting and nurturing new customers. This will ensure you’re reaching the quality and quantity of customers required to see real growth. Your process should be documented and whatever customer relationships management system you use should support this process. Use automated tools where necessary to add efficiency, and make sure to investigate and develop areas where prospects or customers are getting ignored due to lack of resources. It is also worth considering an SLA to help sales and marketing work together in harmony.
Document Your Sales and Marketing Strategy
Ensure you tackle any issues you’ve found using a phased approach and focus on creating a tactical plan for the content going out in your sales and marketing channels. This might involve looking into your social media, inbound marketing, account development, lead generation and lead nurturing etc.
Monitor Your Progress and Develop Your Tactics
Individual team members should be accountable for solving each issue that arises, with innovation and efficiency guiding any developments in your sales and marketing strategy. Check that you are measuring progress with a defined set of metrics, and if you want to see real transformation in your sales, make sure your tactics are continuously evolving. This involves consistently tracking progress, identifying key issues and solving them, and setting objectives for teams in order to maintain progress.
A sales consulting service can also help you to successfully meet your strategic goals. If you’re struggling with poor marketing performance and slow growth as a result, one way you can ensure real value generation for your business is through a sales transformation service such as Facets. Facets appoints a team of experienced commercial directors who implement operations across sales and marketing to provide a transformational service specifically tailored to help you rapidly grow your business. Click here to learn more.