Redding Sales Training
Sales training and your marketing efforts go hand in hand. If you own a business, then you are a marketer. Whether or not you are physically doing the marketing you are still a marketer. As a marketer you must understand that your sales force must be trained and integrated with your marketing to be successful. Your marketing efforts are simply designed to bring prospects and leads into your sales funnel, and at some point interacting with your sales team for the close.
Your sales force is about human contact with customers and potential customers. When your sales force talks to people it needs to integrate directly with your marketing. If we think about the USP that we created in the previous chapter it’s easy to see that everybody in the company should understand the main message you’re trying to promote. But businesses lose focus between marketing and their sales team. This is something that you must integrate immediately,as it’s the only way to truly serve customers and prospects to build lifetime relationships.
As you’re probably aware studies show that you’ll have at least eight contacts with potential customers before the close of the sale. What I am trying to get you to understand is that all of the eight contacts must be a combined effort between your marketing and your sales team. So was we began to design your marketing plans we must also begin to figure out how to include your sales team in the entire process.
This really is a simple concept and it becomes easier to implement when you start seeing the entire process as a whole. Now you have the ability to try new things and test their effectiveness. You also get the added benefit of getting input about the marketing projects you have from your sales force. This can be invaluable in many ways and will ultimately help you close more deals.
You’ll also need to broaden your outlook about who you consider a salesperson. I will suggest any person within your organization that has contact with customers or prospects is part of the sales team. Training these people on how to effectively communicate with your prospects and customers can be the difference between success and failure. This can be accomplished fairly easily by also including them in your marketing and sales meetings, so they understand the overall goals you are trying to accomplish. Then it becomes a simple matter of explaining to each of these individuals how you would like them to handle their contacts with customers.
I understand that every business is different, but I would also say that all businesses are the same. If you begin to integrate your sales and marketing you will find it much easier to successfully build relationships with your prospects and current customers that position your company as the expert in your niche. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into a detailed explanation of how to structure sales staffs and marketing plans, but is definitely within the scope of this article to open your mind to integrating sales and marketing.
So like I said at the beginning of this post you are marketer whether you want to be or not. If someone else handles both of the roles of sales manager and marketing manager you still need to be the rudder of the ship. Be sure that you’re steering their sales and marketing in the exact same direction.
LocalBiz Consultants
2522 Favretto Ave
Redding, CA 96001
(530) 221-3562
