Sales and Marketing nuggets for November 2020
Don't love your products, love your customers The purpose of the company should be to support customers with their business goals. Your products are just a mean for your customers to achieve those goals. Customers can help you with product feedback, and hence they help you remain relevant to the customers.
Is your sales process evolving? Has your sales process evolved over the last one year? Have you included new stages to it? Have you incorporated further questions or new insights that you have acquired previously?
Utilize every opportunity to observe and listen to your customers Your customers are sending your feedback at every touchpoint. If they are visiting your website, analytics would tell you about customer preferences. If they interact with you over the phone, the right questions can lead you to an insight goldmine. If they are visiting your store, your sales rep can interact to create meaningful relationships.
How's your offering addressing the pain caused by the pandemic? The pandemic has created lifelong changes, which amongst them are a pain for your customers. And, how is your offering address those pains inflicted by the COVID-19?
Is your marketing plan driven by business objectives or standard campaigns you have been doing? Marketing planning is an excellent opportunity for marketers to revisit their approach, tools, and frameworks based on business objectives. It is an opportunity to challenge themselves to do better rather than sticking to the status quo.
How do you produce valuable marketing content? Listen to your customers. They will tell you what's important to them. It will also tell you what information they will regard as valuable.
Digital Advertisements are meant to be conversational The nature of the digital platform makes it easier for the customers to respond to your ad. If marketers are not using this platform to converse with their customers, they do not utilize the platform's full potential.
How do you create influence with your information? If your information is actionable and helps your customers drive more business, they will consider you influential.
Is your information sharing helping you build new relationships? Are you able to reach new prospects with your content? Could you set up further meetings through your content initiative? If not, think about what your customers would love to read and write about that.
Is budget an integral part of your yearly marketing plan? Are you incorporating the budget as part of the marketing plan? It will help you plan your spending and track your performance against the expenditure.
Do you have a formal customer feedback strategy in place? Customer feedbacks help marketers in multiple ways despite whether it is positive or negative. However, you should have a strategy in place to gather feedback if one expects to benefit from it.
Are you scanning social media for identifying user-generated content? Your customers might be writing about your brand and the experiences they had on social media. It's a living testimony for you to leverage lying out there. Are you attentive enough to pick it up?
What are your email marketing KPIs? Depending on the nature of the campaign, you might have different campaign objectives and hence KPIs. Unless your KPIs are aligned with your campaign objectives, you might not gather relevant information just yet.
Highly personalized emails are possible only with collected user data If marketers are collecting and storing user data in an organized way, then such a user database becomes the foundation for highly personalized email communication with your audience.
Incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate, and inaccessible data can hamper your business growth If you are making business decisions based on data, you have a good chance of acting in the right direction. However, fragmented and inaccurate data can lead you in the wrong direction or put you to the mercy of gut-feel decisions.
