Sales & Marketing

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24-hour days.” – Zig Ziglar

Think about this…you spend money on recruitment, salaries, benefits, not to mention all the time on interviewing and making sure you have just the right person to sell your product. You do all this incredible work and investment. And when the HR onboarding is all over, you don’t spend any more time or money on helping people develop to sell your product. If you rely on salespeople to sell your product, you just made one of the worst investment decisions of your life. Hiring a bunch of people, but don’t give them any direction.

Sales and Marketing are two main business organizations that help drive revenue and brand within the company. Making sure that these organizations work together and are aligned are important factors to success. Moreover, have as part of your strategic plan how to create these channels is just as important as having the channel. What good is having a sales team if they aren’t properly trained in selling techniques for your specific industry or product, or know how to take a prospect through the process.

Sales Process

All people need a guide, especially sales people. Sales people understand that their role is to sell products or services for your company. However, they will ultimately need help in terms of how to bring a prospect through the sales cycle to closure. Defining the sales cycle, creating a process with some defined steps and resources will set your team up for success from the beginning.

Sales Management

Sales Managers are critical to the success of sales people, not mainly in terms of helping them close deals, but in support of training, managing expectations, setting goals and giving them the tools they need to be successful. Good managers are also excellent at inspiring their people to attain their sales goals. Without a great coach, it’s hard to have a great team.

Sales Training

No matter how good your sales people are, or you think they are, they can only go so far. Everyone needs training in best practices and techniques to help them get better. Just like learning a new sport and continuing to be good at that sport, sales training can help those who are average become good, good become great, and great become legends.

Sales Compensation Plans

Sales people live by the compensation plan, which is why this is imperative to understand how to make sure it not only benefits the sales person, but also attain the company goals. Creating, implementing, explaining and tracking a sales compensation plan can make or break a sales organization.

Sales Performance Evaluations

If your team is evaluated in ways that don’t align with their daily tasks or overall sales goals, then you’re going to create conflict in terms of how they perform and work on a daily basis. This is the critical part of aligning the ‘three legs of the stool’ as mentioned above in Organizational Architecture.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Alright, you’ve got a trained team, excellent process, a great coach, a compensation plan and evaluation system that is rock solid, so now, how are you going to market with your team to sell your product? Most companies don’t think about this, but it is important to create a framework and understanding of how this newly implemented system is going to head out and sell your product, and to whom?

Global Account Management

Global Account Management is a most definitely different beast than straight sales. Depending on the company, the accounts, the infrastructure and support, the role of the Global Account Manager (GAM) can be that of a jack of all trades: Sales, Management, AR/AP, Contracts, Finance, Operations, IT, etc. And most of the time, there isn’t someone who is dedicated to help project managed not only the accounts, but the projects within the accounts themselves. This can be an overwhelming task. We can teach some best practices on how to sell and manage the work load to these global accounts.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing has jettisoned into a very diverse set of services for companies, and it is important to understand the many areas that it encompasses to clearly see what you have to focus on. There are some of the key categories. For example:
1. Design
2. Branding
3. Content Writing
4. Value Proposition Creation
5. Sales Support Services & Content
6. Distribution – Digital Marketing/Traditional Media Marketing
7. Sales Channel Support
8. Trade Shows
9. Social Media Management
10. Branding
All these items are important pieces that into the overall Marketing Strategy and it is important to make sure you don’t use the general term of marketing if you have specific needs.