Tops 10 Sales and Marketing Strategies
Everybody agrees the right story wins the deal. In a commercial environment the best result is achieved when marketing and sales teams work together. The alignment of strategies is essential for organizational success.
This article will provide you with the top 10 sales and marketing strategies to grow leads, increase profitability, efficiency, and close more deals.
MARKETING STRATEGIES
The primary role of marketing is to support sales. Therefore, when it comes to strategies, marketing is all about lead generation, CRM organization, and content creation. So we put a list of a few strategies marketing can follow to optimize these things. The points below are simple and easy to follow, making marketing strategy effective and implementable.
1. EMAIL
Having a database of emails is incredibly valuable for a business. It provides marketing with the ability to target certain segments of clients and send tailored messages. Getting the right product information at the right time can be extremely profitable for a business, inviting your clients to choose you over your competitors even in the pre-sale stage.
2. EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING.
Advertising should be so good that it does the same job as a top sales-performer at your company. Providing information, educating the client, exciting them about the possible new opportunities and allowing them to sign up for either a demo or a trial, can makes advertising and lead generation more effective. Placed strategically, advertising can reach extremely large amount of your target market, being a highly effective form of lead generation for your company.
You should weight up the different types of advetising and how they can fit in with your strategy. Traditional routes like television ads can be quite expensive so it is worth exploring other options like social media sites where you can do sponsored updates to push your content before a targetted audience. Elsewhere, you might want to go down the paid search route to rank for search terms that are important to your business. Once you have identified your best converting content assets, PPC campaigns can also represent good value.
3. REFERRAL SYSTEMS.
Nothing sells better than a referral. With more than 60% of the research being done by a prospect before they even contact a sales-person, one third-party endorsement can sometimes be more powerful than hundreds of presentations. Using the correct approach, a suitable referral system can be a great source of high quality leads. There are plenty of choices for implementing referral systems at your organization, encouraging your clients to refer you to their colleagues in their networking circle. Anything from free product, to a subscription, a points system or a competition to win a trendy gig ticket, can drive referrals and provide companies with leads they never dreamed of.
4. NETWORKING.
People buy from people they like. In most of the cases, the better you know a person the better they like you. There is a good chance your next best prospect is in your college alumni, a gala organized by the charity you support or any other networking event that people within your industry would attend. Getting face-to-face time with your prospect to intro your product or service allows you to communicate, listen and explain your product without the pressure of the corporate environment. Moreover, by meeting a client you can make an impression so that even if they don’t have a need for your product right now, they will get in touch if such an opportunity arises.
5. ONLINE PRESENCE.
With the whole of society moving online, it is vital for a successful company to have a website that is informative, easy to navigate and provides potential clients with everything they need to know about your business. Moreover, to get more people to come to your website, successful marketers will focus on writing SEO posts on the targeted content related to your target market. This will draw people to your website, and with the strategic and tactical landing pages will let you obtain emails of new leads.
SALES STRATEGIES
The Sales team is the face of the company. Having a smart, professional and driven sales team is a crucial part of organic company growth. As the primary function of sales is to educate, support and convey the benefits of the business, their strategy lies around these things and how to get more efficient and productive with these. To help and maximize your sales strategies, we’ve put a list of Top 5 strategies that will increase your effectiveness.
1. MEET THE DECISION MAKER.
Regardless of your industry, unless you convince a decision maker that your product or service will bring the company profits, no deal will be closed. It is important to identify and set a meeting with a key decision maker at your target company at the earliest convenience. Even if you’re not sure exactly who it is at a specific organization, you can assume, based on your earlier deals, what role the decision maker performs at your target organization. Most of the time, it would be VP and above level executives, who have a yearly budget. So go ahead, get in front of the leaders and sell.
2. BE YOURSELF.
People can sense it if you’re being a pushy salesperson. Nobody likes being sold to, but everybody loves to buy. It’s important to show your prospect that you’re genuinely interested in the well-being of their business and not only care about closing the deal. If you conduct research, prepare, listen and have an actual conversation rather than hitting them with a one-way sales pitch – more likely than not, you will close this deal.
3. KNOW YOUR COMPETITION.
If you’re selling a product or a solution, and come across competition – it’s a good sign. It means you’re selling something in demand that a lot of people saw a value in. It’s important to know your competitors inside out, their pros and cons. That way you can tailor and present your product or service in a way that will make you stand out and choose you over everybody else.
4. ANTICIPATE OBJECTIONS.
In a sales scenario, very rarely will you come across an objection that nobody has ever heard before. Chances are, your colleagues have had exactly the same problem and have already prepared documents, RFPs or solutions to solve it. Having a sales team share and discuss possible objections, or have access to the documents previously prepared by the colleagues, can increase efficiency, productivity and ensure constant improvement of the message conveyed to a potential customer.
5. CREATE A SENSE OF URGENCY.
Putting a deadline on a deal, promotion or an offer can create a sense of urgency and make sure the customer knows how valuable both of your time is. It’s important to convey the message that the cost of staying the same will actually cost more in the long term. Very often, smaller deals will have countless meetings, months wasted sitting in pipeline and lack the executive incentive to make a decision. Creating a sense of urgency portrays that you’re not here to waste time, but rather provide you with a solution that will start helping your business straight away.
These are our chosen top 10 sales and marketing strategies. There are of course, plenty more available out there, but even implementing these 10 is a good place to start.