The Sales and Marketing Professionals
Selling Smart-Getting the Most From EVERY Sales Contact
You have invested thousands of dollars in brochures, PR, a marketing staff, marketing support and all the other elements you feel you need to compete in today's market. How do you know you're getting optimum results from your sales and marketing effort?
Within your marketing equation, the selling variable is the proof of the pudding. How can you determine, early in the game, whether those you have assigned sales responsibility for new business development are working smart or working as effectively as they could? With off-the-shelf client contact software available at low cost, putting accountability into your marketing effort is easier.
Here are some simple steps you can use to tell if your people are working smart.
1. Require a weekly itinerary from all people assigned client contact responsibility. This should identify appointments and contacts scheduled for the coming week. This should present no problem, because effective marketers are often scheduling appointments two to three weeks in advance anyway. If your marketers are not planning ahead and are winging it with cold calls and perfunctory telephone contacts, the quality of your effort will suffer.
2. Require weekly client and prospect reports to be filed. Review these to see how closely they follow the itinerary sheets outlined above and whether they are focused on the target clients and markets the firm has committed to.
3. Accompanying your marketers on personal calls on clients or prospects is the best way I know to evaluate his or her skills and work habits.
Here are some things to look for on those calls:
- In the car, before going into the prospect's office, ask the marketer what his or her call objective for this call is--what he or she wants to accomplish. A good marketer will not hesitate with the answer. He or she will respond with a specific, measurable objective. One that often builds on previous calls. A call objective of “client maintenance” for example, is a clue that the marketer may not be prepared and may just be going through the motions. Even on client maintenance calls, there should be an objective or an outcome you want to happen as a result of having been there. The call objective should require the prospect to take some action to move the selling process further along. For example a call objective might be: to get the client to identify the competition on this project or; to determine the real selection criteria.
-After the call, critique the call with your marketer. Review the call objective and call results. Ask what needs to happen now based on what we have learned on this call--where do we go from here?
If you do this periodically with your marketers (sometimes on short notice), they will learn that they are accountable. They will learn to always be prepared. They will develop a results-oriented sales vocabulary that requires setting call objectives and getting commitments from clients and prospects. Most of all, you will see first hand how the sales effort is working.
When marketers know they must be prepared for each call and that a principal may want to accompany them at any time, you should see your business development efforts improve dramatically.