Sales and marketing – your joint money making machine

In many businesses, the relationship between sales and marketing is akin to that of the Montagues and Capulets, both equally stacked in the game of love and war.

 

Even amongst my friends in sales I feel like I, the sole trooper for marketing, must justify my existence. Similarly, us marketers are not beyond making the odd comment under our breath as we pass the sales office.

 

I am here today to extend the olive branch and show that sales and marketing are fundamentally intertwined; one is not as effective without the other.

 

 Here’s why.

 

1. Because making money is not easy.

Making money requires a fine tuned and well greased money making machine (ie. the spinning cogs that are your sales and marketing staff, your internal processes and sales pipeline). When running at optimum efficiency, you can achieve a reduction in the cost of acquisition and sales.

 

Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.

 

For example, Darren operates a small accounting and financial services firm in Western Sydney. He was telling me his recent fax campaign went dismally. Darren’s campaign was cleverly written, his offering was highly valued and he had targeted his communications appropriately to each market segment. What let him down was that fact that he blasted his fax out to 5,000 recipients, far too great a number for his two business development managers to follow up, assess each client’s needs, close the deal and then account manage.

 

By the time his poor BDMs were able to follow up the campaign with phone calls, the leads had gone cold. They got many expressions of interest but only 2 new clients, making the cost of acquisition per client incredibly high.

 

2. Because the machine needs to be constantly fed.

Whether you provide a product or service, your sales pipeline is the selling journey that prospects go on to become a customer or client. Give or take a few steps, a typical sales pipeline is mapped out below.

 

Leads- Qualified lead- Sale - Customer - Repeat customer

 

Without marketing, it’s a slow and arduous road to get leads. Without sales staff, it becomes difficult to close the sale. Businesses should have staff and processes that facilitate each stage of the pipeline, but when marketing and sales are misaligned, either bottlenecks appear or the pipeline stops being fed. The net result – no leads, no revenue. It’s that simple.

 

Thus, sales strategies and marketing strategies must work hand in hand to attract and push leads through your pipeline.

 

3. To get the most out of the machine

Ideally your business should be maximising the dollar value per sale.

 

If you run a small business, you will know that acquiring new customers costs more than selling to existing ones. There is no simpler way to increase your revenue than to have existing customers, who already know and enjoy your offerings, spend more.

 

To achieve this, you need great customer intelligence and great execution. Finding market niches, developing competitive strengths and ultimately, selling the right offering to the right customer requires knowledge about your competitors, customers and your markets. All of this is reliant on the information and development synergies that stem from sales and marketing.

 

Simple ways you can do this include:

a. Up-selling or cross-selling additional products or services – As a simple example, if you know that soup is a big seller amongst your customers during winter months, then offer them incentives to buy more. How about a discount for big orders? What about cross promoting your homemade garlic bread? Or even a frequent buyers incentive?

 

Whilst it is your sales staff who do the selling, your marketing staff must work with them to develop the right up-selling or cross selling message that will hit the sweet spot. Sales people know a lot about existing customers, competitors and the market, whilst marketers take this information to craft the most attractive offer for each specific audience.

 

b. Bundling additional products or services into one deal – but how do you offer something that is genuinely of value to your customers? Use your knowledge about your customers to come up with the right products, price, distribution channels and promotion method (ie. the 4P’s of marketing) and aligned these with your sales pipeline. If you come up with a few options, then why not test them with different sets of customers? Your sales staff will be the first to hear what works and what doesn’t.

 

If it doesn’t cost you anything to try out both options or if you can minimise your risk (ie. not cannibalise or lose your existing sales) then its worth a go. I call this the Google approach.

 

c. Increasing prices – This is slightly trickier because good communications and positioning are necessary for successfully increasing prices without jeopardising sales.

 

For example, you may choose to increase your prices to differentiate yourself from competitors as a perceived price bracket also tends to bring with it pre-conceived notions on quality. To do so, you may either explain to your customers why prices are increasing (such as a switch to organic tomatoes for your soup), highlight improvements to your offering (ie. the improved health benefits of your soup) or both. At all times, make sure you effectively communicate the strength of your competitive advantage and you’ve researched that your target market will bear this increase.

 

To avoid losing customers, its good business practice to notify them of the price increase in advance and back up your communications with strong client management.

 

Although it seems quite obvious, you would be surprised at how many companies’ sales and marketing activities don’t sing in unison (even the big companies often get this wrong!). Develop your sales strategies, develop your marketing strategies and make sure that the two are aligned because now you can see that the costs of failing to do so maybe greater than you think.

 

This article is brought to you by Australian Business Marketing Services, giving you no nonsense, results driven marketing at a price that you can afford. Contact us today on 1800 505 529 or via email for assistance with your marketing needs.

By Vanessa Tsui