Sales & Marketing
We believe they are some of both with sales being much more of an art and marketing being much more of a science.
What we have found over our decades of experience interacting with businesses both large and small across many sectors is that many organizations view them as neither and some, oddly, as one in the same. Worse, we have seen marketing and especially sales confused with business development.
We believe the root of the issue is a failure to develop marketing and sales plans and then implement them. Without these plans, it is difficult for organizations to understand the cost benefit of sales and marketing. Moreover they can not clearly see how business development fits in to revenue generation.
Marketing Led and Sales Driven
Revenue Development Model |
How does this revenue development model compare with your organization's model? Marketing and Business Development work hand in hand to develop products and services for Sales to sell. |
We believe that organizations need to be marketing led and sales driven. But we have seen organizations that do not even have sales and/or marketing staff.
Some reasons for this are:
- Sales staff receives little or no training in the art of selling. Often sales staff “feature dump” their product or service’s attributes versus consultative selling leading to poor sales results and hence a poor return on sales staff investment.
- The marketing plan depends on a product or service being bought versus being sold.
- A previous lack of commitment to implement marketing and/or sales plans leading to perceived waste of time, money and effort.
- Marketing plans integrating business development of new products and services
- Sector analyses
- Pricing analyses
- Marketing materials, web content, conferences
- Sales plans
- Sales training and/or selection of sales training programs
- Customer account plans
- Contract negotiations