Research and planning. This is by far the best way to harness the power of marketing and sales. Even though both fields are much more detailed than that, a solid foundation is always a good idea.
To get a feel for what this entails, here are some tips and ideas that can help you scale your business.
1. Do Extensive Research
Every good strategy begins with research. The high-value analysis allows you to define your business, know your industry and understand your customer. Three things that form the foundation of marketing and sales.
In terms of defining your business, you will determine what it means to be successful and your short and long-term goals. When it comes to knowing your industry, focus on your competition and determine certain industry standards and offers that might help you get off the ground. And to understand your customers, you will need to learn their pain points and how to get them to engage with your business.
2. Create an Effective Strategy
To start, you need to define your sales process. This involves determining your market presence, and how you intend to communicate your products and services to potential buyers. You will also need to figure out key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success when you start attracting and converting those leads into actual customers.
As neither marketing nor sales are truly effective on their own, your strategy should combine them into a marketing strategy. This type of strategic business planning aligns these two fields, in order to improve the chances of your efforts while reducing risk at the same time.
Since both sales and marketing teams share the same final goal, improved communication will help them agree on milestones to reach that goal. Marketing will learn how many SQLs (sales qualified leads) it needs to attract, while sales re-evaluates them and moves them further down the sales funnel.
3. Set Your Revenue Target
A revenue target is a financial goal you want to achieve out of sales within a designated period. This number can be as generous (high) or conservative (low) as you want it, depending on how much money you need to make your business profitable.
The number you set can be related to your monthly income goal. It can be determined on an investment that allows you to scale your business, like technology and software innovations or a salary for a new team member. Whatever it is, always measure it during your efforts and analyze the results afterward.
If you missed it, the results will help you understand why were unable to hit the revenue target and improve underperforming sales or marketing channels. In case you reach the target, you will learn how you were able to deliver those results and what is required to emulate them.
4. Create a Buyer’s Journey
Similar to Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s Journey, your customers pass through different stages on their way to buying your product and service. In that sense, this is their buyer’s journey, which has three stages:
- Awareness stage – buyers recognize an obstacle or opportunity they want to follow;
- Consideration stage – buyers define their goal and determine available methods to achieve it;
- Decision stage – buyers decide on the solution they want to pursue.
In order to create a truly effective roadmap to your buyer’s journey, you need to interact with clients to know what obstacles they might be facing. Conduct your research through interviews or quality paid surveys online, to get the data that will help you define their path.
5. Create Authoritative Content
Quality, high-value content is the number one means of attracting leads. Companies that produce content on a regular basis on their blogs gather a greater number of leads than businesses that don’t.
The goal here is to give customers free knowledge and position yourself as an authority in your industry. This means writing pieces which solve problems for your customers, give advice, or provide help when they want to achieve something.
When it comes to the actual writing, seasoned in-house or outsourced copy and content writers are an excellent solution.
6. Optimize Your Website and Content
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is another thing which concerns your website. Using keyword phrases relevant to your business, you can improve the rank of your website and move it towards page one in search engine results.
This type of marketing is long-term. A lot of patience is required, as you can to wait up to a year until you see actual results. Once you do, however, you can expect an unimaginable amount of traffic and leads coming to your website.
A quick tip to gain immediate first-page position on Google is trying to rank for a featured snippet for a particular phrase associated with your business.
7. Take Action
All the planning and research in the world is useless unless you implement it into your business. Start small and slowly move up. As you do, you will be able to explore and discover new sales and marketing opportunities that will create a strategy suited specifically to your business.
When that happens, you start achieving your goals and start gathering success. All the while, you will be at the head of that success stream, with a front-row seat, watching your company grow.
My name is Raul, editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology, online marketing. You can reach me out on Twitter.
Embracing the best procedure can be a baffling and demanding task. It is a long procedure to perfect, however, with the proper research, planning, strategies and tools, you can achieve the volume and quality of leads required to improve your sales results, meet your objectives and grow as a business.