Driving sales and marketing takes a tremendous amount of work but there is a certain simplicity and focus to the effort as illustrated to the right. Fundamentally, sales is an engine with investment going into generating leads coming together with a certain amount of optimization, sales activities, and a way of measuring gains so we know everything is staying on track.
The secret is not in doing more of what you have today, it’s to find out how to do that extra 15%. Improving the engine by 15% is a reasonable goal – but it also has a tremendous impact because that incremental 15% ends up doubling the size of your business over five years.
Four fundamentals to driving 15% incremental revenue
Let’s be candid, there is a reasonable amount of clean-up that needs to be done first before really stepping on the gas. Sometimes your company’s web-site is just not up to par, or there is no CRM, or the SEO wasn’t done properly so there is no web traffic, or maybe there is no client database or mechanism for doing outreach to prospects. All these are basic issues you are probably dying to fix. Once they are addressed, we focus on four fundamentals to get the growth:
- Consistency: Selling is a persistent activity. There is revenue in just being persistent about talking with customers and prospects.
- Information: Certain information is worth its weight in gold. Let’s say you know specifically the name of the company that came to your website in response to outbound messaging. WOW – Sales guys know how to action that information and turn it into revenue; right?
- Shortened sales cycles: Sales cycles are long for two reasons: i) Sales people don’t have enough new prospects and spend too much time selling low probability accounts; and, ii) Sales people need to be able to identify and prioritize time to the most promising prospects and seeing if their tactics are engaging them. Both of these are essential.
- BEING FRUGAL: There are lots of great ideas for generating business, but the difficulty lies in the execution. We need to be frugal about what to focus on so we get results without breaking the bank.
Sure, sales like getting a HOT lead; actually, they love that. The question is “can you consistently get them one, be frugal about it, and shorten the sales cycle?” Does all this sound impossible? It’s not, but the technology and processes and skills behind it are very different. Getting 15% more sales consistently is more than just ‘more leads’ – there’s complexity to it. That’s why 63%[i] of companies outsource some or all of their marketing automation strategy.
[i] Marketo and Ascend2, ”Marketing automation trends survey” (2015)
To learn more about getting more sales, download MoreSALES’ Frugal Tactics for Building Your Sales Engine white paper.
