Are you in the planning phase for 2018?
Have you been challenged to build a strategic foundation for your Sales and Marketing operations in 2018?
To activate powerful revenue growth, you need to start with a strong strategic foundation for data driven marketing. You need to connect with your buyers, stand out from your competitors and understand how prospects move through your sales funnel. With this strategic foundation, you secure a competitive advantage that empowers you to meet and exceed your revenue goals.
You need to focus on five key areas when doing so.
1) Buyer Persona Development
Driving more revenue requires a deep understanding of your prospects and customers. You need to go beyond a surface-level understanding of demographics, job titles, and goals.
We help you deepen your understanding of your prospects and what motivates them to do business with you. Working together, we create detailed buyer persona documents that flesh out your prospects' pains, motivations, and questions.
These documents help you visualize your buyers as real, live people. With this understanding and empathy, you can engineer your sales and marketing tactics to deeply resonate with your personas.
2) Messaging and Differentiation
If your messaging and service delivery looks exactly the same as your competitors, you may as well be invisible.
You need to book some time with your team and have an in-depth understanding of your business and what sets you apart. From these conversations, you should develop overarching and tactical messaging that transcends surface-level analyses like "unique value propositions" and "unique selling propositions." With these robust new messaging and service delivery strategies, you establish your business as truly remarkable and worth talking about.
3) Storytelling
People are wired to connect with stories. That's why storytelling has been the foundation of persuasion since humans first began communicating with language.
Building trust with your prospects and overcoming any sales objections they may have requires powerful storytelling. You need stories that evoke strong emotional responses from your prospects for sales conversations, case studies, and digital content.
You need to create compelling, disruptive, and emotional stories your prospects can identify with. Once you have built these stories and shared them with prospects, moving them through the funnel and convincing them to sign on the dotted line becomes a much easier process.
4) Funnel Analytics
If your sales and marketing funnel is flawed or broken, converting strangers into leads and leads into customers becomes next to impossible.
You need to discover the friction points and gaps in your funnel. You need to analyze what's stopping prospects from continuing through. You need to have a Flawless Funnel process, where you can develop a detailed picture of your new, ideal funnel, and create an action plan for how to build it. Once you have developed your Flawless Funnel, you will have a simplified and streamlined way to propel prospects from initial click to conversion to close.
5) Sales and Marketing Orchestration Outperforms Alignment
To generate a significant increase in revenue, you need sales and marketing to work harmoniously together.
Be honest with yourself and take a 360-degree view of all your sales and marketing tactics. Try to determine where those tactics are aligned and where there is discord. Then devise a plan to configure these tactics so that they are perfectly threaded together to avoid dissonance.
Through this sales and marketing orchestration, you build an integrated program that operates seamlessly to make a major impact on your revenue growth.
At the end of the day, it should all look like the following:
1) Strategic thinking and planning
2) Reaching out to new prospects
3) Drive new visitors to your website
4) Convert visitors into leads
5) Nurture leads
6) Turn leads into sales opportunities
7) Close new customers
8) Create advocacy
*Repeat (2-8) since it should be an engine that is working 24/7/365. Then review (1) each year.
I have been working with B2B organizations for the past four years. I know that for some, this is a significant commitment of time and maybe there are no internal resources to help in building this strategic plan, so companies will usually default back to relying on growing the business by word of mouth and referral business or even hiring more sales people to fix their marketing problem which is a huge mistake.
You need to be clear of what challenge are you trying to fix.
Is it your Marketing or your Sales?
By the way, there is nothing wrong with relying on word of mouth and referrals. Those are the best leads and the fastest to close, but if you are racing against time, especially if you were challenged to grow faster than your competition, then you have to think differently.
That is why Flawless Inbound has created the JUMP Start Package to help you out.
If you have any questions about Flawless Inbound or our growth strategies, we want to hear from you.