As an ambitious business owner, you'll know how important growing your sales is to your business. This is why many SMEs invest heavily in their sales team – sometimes at the expense of marketing. But how can you support your sales team to do the best possible job, in the most cost-effective way? A key part of the answer is to have an effective marketing strategy in place. Here's why.
Attracting The Right Market
It's great to attract potential customers, but you want them to be the right potential customers. Someone who has no intention of buying your product or subscribing to your service isn't going to help your business. Your website is a key asset, and you need it to generate as many qualified leads as possible. Otherwise, you'll be limited to other forms of lead generation. While referrals and word of mouth are valuable, they're only a part of the optimum marketing strategy. A marketing strategy ensures your sales team don’t waste time chasing low value or unqualified leads.
Maintaining Stability
Your business may be going along nicely at the moment, with plenty of sales and good, valued customers. But what happens if things change? If one of your major customers decides to go elsewhere and use a competitor, or if it runs into difficulty during the Covid 19 crisis or in the month to follow, what effect would that have on your company's viability? If you couldn't withstand a change like this, then you're playing with fire. It's really important to have a business model that will keep you afloat and thriving even during tough and uncertain times. Therefore, you need to generate as many qualified leads as you can – and then convert them.
Driving Growth
One of the most common warning signs that you don't have the right approach to marketing your business is if your sales figures don't grow in the way you've been expecting. If things slow down, become stagnant or even move into reverse, that should tell you that your marketing isn't getting through to your customer base. Since you can't expect all your customers to stay forever and grow with you, you need to be constantly generating more leads. This is the job of your marketing team, not sales. In other words, to produce the strong growth that leads to higher profits for your company, you must have an effective marketing strategy, or your sales staff will quickly run out of qualified leads.
Great Marketing Means Great ROI
Marketing is an investment for the long term. Yes, it's going to mean digging into your pockets – but the benefits can far outweigh the costs. A good marketing strategy will support and empower your sales team to make more sales, at a higher value. This doesn’t mean investing in a whole new marketing team. Work with an experienced, trusted agency like JDR who will take the time and effort to understand your business needs, and you'll be in a great place to reap the rewards down the line.
Marketing & Sales Should Be Aligned
The reason for this is pretty simple: successful marketing will bring you a lot more marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Then, your own sales team can take over and nurture them to produce sales-qualified leads (SQLs). In other words, out of all the people who look at your website, the proportion who will go on to become your customers is likely to be considerably higher. Better marketing leads to better sales.
Find Out More
Like any company owner, you want your business to grow and profits to increase. A good marketing strategy is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. In terms of value for money, there's very little to beat it. To find out more and get started (yes, we’re working as normal during the shutdown) please call 01332 343281 today.
Image source: Pixabay
