PART


GETTING SALES AND MARKETING IN SYNC 5


Strategy #27. Align your assets with customer needs. Don’t assume your current products and services are the only things you have to offer your customers. When ap- proaching a strategic customer, step back and look at the assets your entire company can bring to bear. Then, align your assets with the customer’s needs in order to provide unique value and keep competitors locked out. Strategy #28. Interview your customers as well as your non-customers. After every big sales effort, hire a third party to interview the appropriate decision maker in the customer’s organization – regardless of whether you got the sale. Find out what you did right, what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and (if necessary) why the competition won.


Of all the old selling adages, the truest surely must be, “Long-term customer relationships create a profit today and a base for sales tomorrow.” To build your sales future, plan for it today by following this seven- point program designed to produce positive results.


1. After closing a sale, suggest another product that might interest your customer. Don’t try to make another sale on the spot. Just a mention of another product will help pave the way to a future sale. When you identify your customer’s future needs, you save selling time and effort, and you increase future sales.


Strategy #29. Don’t throw good cash after bad. Some sales managers try to spend their firm out of a sales slump – an effort that typically takes the form of brand-oriented mar- keting and scattershot advertising. That approach seldom works, though, because, in most cases, it was your current marketing and advertising that created the sales slump in the first place. Instead, consider the opposite approach and raise the marketing budget when revenue and profit are growing, instead of cutting it when sales are sparse. Strategy #30. “Narrowcast” your marketing messages.


Typically, marketing is seen as a “broadcast” discipline – with an emphasis on getting a unified message out to a large number of people. Sales, however, tends to be “narrowcast” – with the emphasis on the sales rep working to understand a customer’s unique needs and then crafting a unique solution. Supporting both types of messaging is expensive, though, because “broad- cast” marketing materials are too general to be useful in a “narrowcast” sales environment. To bring the two together, you should direct marketing to move away from “broadcast” and instead focus on programs that help sales “narrowcast” unique solutions. 


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SELLING TIP Seven Simple Tips to Plan for Future Sales


2. Learn at least one new sales approach each day. Listen to podcasts, watch videos, reg- ister for webinars, download white papers, read blogs, join LinkedIn groups, and search for hashtags on Twitter (try #salestip or #leadership). Take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge available to you for free.


3. Learn from your mistakes. Each mistake can teach you a valu- able lesson – and many of the best sales ideas originated from mistakes.


4. Make each sales contact a pleasure for your customers. Listen carefully to their needs. Show them that you really care about fulfilling those needs – not just making a sale. They’ll


be eager to repeat the experi- ence in the future.


5. Write down the ideas you have each day. It takes only a word or two to remind yourself of a good idea you can use in the future.


6. Build on the trust and confi- dence your customer already has in you and your company. Your customer should think of you first for any future needs. This doesn’t happen automati- cally. You have to sell that trust and confidence the way you sell any other product or service.


7. Identify new sales opportunities – or look for accounts to which you are giving only half-hearted attention. Concentrate on low- performing areas to increase your sales. Build a solid custom- er base today, and you’ll start turning a profit tomorrow. – ERNEST W. FAIR


SELLING POWER NOVEMBER 2015 | 17 © 2015 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.


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