Want better sales and marketing results for your small business? (Yes, non profits need marketing and sales results, also.)
Here are four crucial steps to better sales and marketing results. This short series of articles and tips is a condensed version of the Conversion Marketing Experts, full-blown sales and marketing strategy and action planning system called The CME Sales & Marketing Success Builder action planning system for high-performance sales and marketing teams.
My goal in sharing these sales and marketing insights with you is to help you attract and convert more customers leveraging insights from our system. Success in small business is all about customers and capital. Everything else follows these two essential requirements.
Unless you’re a Fortune 100 brand or have way too many customers already, your marketing should have a singular purpose; sales results. Sales, given proper pricing and knowing how to run a business, should result in a profit, after all expenses. Simple, not easy. Once these two elements are in place your chances of defying the failure statistics increase dramatically. This is all about customers and capital.
Some of these insights, disciplines as I refer to them, may seem elementary or perhaps too fundamental for some readers. The goal is to deliver something useful for the majority of the people reading this content. And as my father always used to tell me about business and life, “Never stop practicing the fundamentals!”
Keep in mind, this series of articles is most about the beginning of a much bigger process to craft high-ROI sales and marketing campaigns. It’s the top of the funnel type of planning, so to speak. There are five components or stages for the process we call our Ideal Customer Relationship Lifecycle. These include …
1. Attract the right people to know about what you offer.
2. Engage people with compelling content of high value.
3 Convert people to becoming customers at the appropriate time.
4. Serve people with gratitude to ensure they are happy.
5. Learn from the results and adapt.
Here we go … Step number one. (Discover phase)
Insight #1: Plan for sales and marketing success. (Discover phase.)
This may seem completely obvious. Yet, most businesses have zero when it comes to a real sales and marketing plan of action. Forget a business plan. Unless you are sucking up to a banker or making investor pitches to raise money, focus on sales and marketing action planning. You need a real plan to follow as much as you need to make sure everyone on your team is being held accountable to the action steps you all agree upon.
Your sales and marketing action plan does not have to be fancy. In fact, if you follow each of these posts and take notes you will see that the end result of reflecting upon the insights and answering each of the questions I pose to you, you will have a new level of clarity and focus for your sales and marketing team. You will have a plan. At least you will if you actually DO the work I suggest!
Write the insight and question below in a new notebook or format that you like. You can record this and the next twenty-nine insights/questions I share. The most important discipline you can do for yourself, your team, your company and your family is to get more focused and disciplined. Get on track with a real plan. Block time for the activity of planning and working “on” your business each and every week. Study the plan, the numbers and constantly raise the bar.
It’s often that simple. Do the work. Follow the plan. Humans get comfortable. We don’t like change. But when we make the time to ask the right questions and include the right people on the team for sales and marketing, you get clarity. When you get clarity of purpose, goals, ROI, and action steps you tend to get better results, fast.
Here’s your homework. Ask yourself and any key sales and marketing people on your team …
Question #1: “Where is our road map for success as a team?”
If you have a legitimate plan of action for sales and marketing, pull it off the shelf and get ready to improve upon it. Or scrap it and start over with this thirty-day exercise.
If not, now you have no excuse. Use what I am giving to you. You now are forming a killer sales and marketing action plan.
I always appreciate your comments and questions here on the Conversion Marketing Experts blog.
To your continued success and happiness.
