Link sales team, marketing

Even a small sales force costs more than most small or midsize businesses spend annually on marketing. Optimize yours and make it a marketing channel that efficiently drives new business and grows revenue.

Business owners often squirm in their seats when having to decide whether hiring a full-time marketing manager or deploying paid media campaigns are worth the financial risk. Often, every dollar spent on marketing comes under intense scrutiny, whereas money spent on the salaries and commissions for the sales team is something of an afterthought.

In fact, your sales force – not your advertising budget – should be thought of as your most expensive marketing channel for growing your business.

Even a small team of five salespeople easily accounts for at least $350,000 in annual salaries, overhead, benefits and bonuses. That’s a good deal more than most small or midsize businesses spend annually on marketing. This money is often allocated inefficiently if the sales force is not optimized to sell in the same way that a marketing channel is.

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Your company’s marketing plan is its blueprint for increasing sales. Your sales force must become an extension of that plan in order to sell the right products or services to the right customers, at the right time in the right way. Even the most perfectly laid out marketing plan is worthless if the salespeople do not understand their role in bringing it to life.

Like any other marketing channel, your company’s sales force must be integrated into the customer experience. Customers today won’t tolerate fragmented engagement across various channels.

You must demand that your company’s sales force becomes a well-oiled machine in the same way that you would expect flawless execution of marketing campaigns in the other various channels.

This requires putting in place metrics. Your sales team should review KPIs, such as the number of prospect meetings, the number of sales calls, the number of in-person appointments, and customer retention rates, on at least a monthly basis. Salespeople’s time should then be allocated in order to achieve the desired levels of these KPIs.

As you optimize your sales team’s time, ask the following questions:

n Does each salesperson have a clearly defined sales calendar in place for the upcoming quarter?

n Are my company’s sales activities aligned with its marketing and its business objectives?

n In each salesperson’s day, are there inefficiencies that need to be reviewed and corrected?

n Are there clearly defined metrics in place to judge and hold the salespeople accountable for their efforts?

n Is the sales force equipped with the right tools, such as CRM software, pitch presentations, and other marketing assets, to convert prospects into customers?

n Are we mining data about existing customers for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities?

Ultimately, you should develop a universal process for your company’s salespeople. They should also be held to metrics-based standards.

Review the salespeople’s schedules and the sales calendars. Are the salespeople using their time wisely? Are they focusing on the right priorities?

If you give salespeople the structure, marketing assets, support and guidance that they need and hold them accountable in regular meetings, your company will maximize its marketing dollars and will be better positioned for top-line growth. •

Chris Ciunci is founder and managing partner of TribalVision, which has offices in Warwick, Boston and New York.

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