No growth is possible in a company if no one contacts you to buy your product and/or service. Thus, you must generate interest and attract qualified leads.
How can your solution be noticed and preferred?
By improving your product and/or service? No. Rather by becoming better in marketing.
Q: What is Marketing?
A: The lack of marketing strategies is the main cause of poor performance in sales. Without marketing, all leads are routed directly to sales, where only 25% of them are qualified. Result: more than 75% of these prospects will never be converted to customers, which will lead to frustration and a waste of time and energy for the sales force.
In comparison, companies that have a marketing action plan generate 50% more qualified leads at a 33% lower cost. The sales force can focus on leading prospects to buy, while marketing works on those who show an interest.
Marketing is essential for the growth and survival of a high-tech company. It helps to understand the needs and expectations of the target market. It helps to direct prospects to the solution they need. In short, the stronger your marketing is, the more successful your business will be.
Q: How can Marketing facilitate the work in Sales?
A: Take a balance and have on one side sales and on the other marketing. If you do not put any marketing activity into action, all the commercial weight will be on the sales side. They will have the responsibility alone to attract prospects, qualify them, inform them about the technology, compare it to the competitions’, counter the objections while having to negotiate, establish trust and close the sales. In such a context, the vendors will quickly be overwhelmed, and the quality of the service they give will soon be affected.
However, if marketing actions are in place, sales will only focus on the best prospects already predisposed to buy, which means more sales while saving time and money.
What should your marketing actions include? First, you should generate leads using both inbound and outbound strategies. Second, you should qualify the interest of your prospects in order to transfer only the best ones to the sales team. Qualification can be done by using a scoring method that annotates points to prospects according to the activities they participate in or the downloads they make.
Finally, the most important part of your marketing actions is to predispose the prospects to purchase your solution. This will be done through a nurturing process involving useful, relevant and unique content about your product and/or service.
Do you have a Marketing Strategy?
Very often the factor that determines the success or failure of a product and/or service is the way it is marketed.
Those with a marketing strategy to guide their commercial actions are starting one step ahead.
To your success!
Stephanie Labrecque, Eng. MBA
stephanie@in-spira.ca
581-999-0724