If you read my first posts maybe you know by now that the marketing brings the revenue not the sales, not you product or solution.
Maybe you have a great product/solution but it remains just on the shelf. Does it bring you money? No.
If you do not use correctly marketing you will loose potential clients. Ok, you can say that the marketing is not about selling, the marketing is just marketing. No, you are wrong. The marketing is a weapon to sell well. If you look at the big companies, most of them do NOT use sales people, they use only marketing and the well-defined communication process.
Without marketing you will loose your target group.
Every CEO knows it, so they create the same mistake: they hire marketing managers...
You don't want to do the marketing because that is boring, you don't know it well, etc... If you would ask 10 CEOs, which area is the worst in their companies 9 will answer the marketing and PR.
So back to the first thought: you are hiring a marketing manager... Usually there is only one problem with them, they cost more than the money that they bring back to the company.
There are a lot of marketing experts but they are not looking for jobs. They do their own jobs.
There are only two solutions:
- you do the job or
- you will start to help somebody to learn the job.
No matter which solution you choose, you will need the KNOWLEDGE first!
You will not need books, not university programs, you will will need real daily experts, real knowledge from the business life.
One very important thing:
The marketing generates people who are interested in your product or solution.
And the sales people will close the deal.
So you have a good need for good sales people.
You will need sales people who are with you not with your customers.
How can a sales person kill your business?
I tell you three examples:
1., Let's the client to push the price down. Usually the clients reaction to sales people is that a certain product or solution is cheaper in the next store, company, etc. The sales person usually say immediately, ok I give you 10% discount. But why??? At this point is the sales person working for you or working for the client???
2., A client or a possible buyer calls your company and the sales person in your company asks the possible buyer to write down his/her requests in an e-mail. NO! The 80% of the clients have no time to write e-mails, they need immediate answers, this is why they have called you directly.
3., If the sales can not manage the personal contacts.
You can create your own measuring system to control the sales work measuring system to control the sales work! This is what I like to do the most. :-)
A very simple example.
I had a big FMCG client. They had a lot of sales representatives.
The job was simple: the sales reps went to the stores and asked the orders. But the main task was to create a good relationship with the stores.
This company had in average 78 sales representatives in one country when I went there to help them. The CEO asked my help because the product was good but the revenue increased only 4-5% per year. It was not enough.
I created a little survey...
I asked some store owners about how their relationship with the sales representatives was, how they created the orders?
They said that the sales guys were there only in the first 3-4 times and after just called them for the new orders. Because the personal relations were not managed, cared for, looked after, the store owners never ordered anymore.
So I created a software solution to solve the problem.
Every sales representative had a Blackberry. Their job remained the same: to take the orders but the software wasn't the same...when the sales rep. put the order into the system, the software in the background checked the GPS coordinates. From this little measurement the company got the statistics that only 2.3 % of the orders were registered personally at the client through direct relationship. We showed this result to the sales people, and fired the worst 10. We told the sales rep. exactly what we are monitoring and that the company will be monitoring every sales order from now on.
Next month the registration done personally with the clients was 99.4% but the travel costs were still high.
I talked with the company CEO and we started to register the routes as well and analyze them...
After the second month the fuel costs decreased by 72%, because the sales people went to the client in the optimal route and the orders from the personal visitings were still 99.4%!!!
We saved costs on fuel and won more orders because of the personal contacts.
That's simple. Measure your marketing and sales and never trust in your employees. This is business!
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