In sales-driven companies, marketing looks different than in marketing-driven companies. Done correctly, marketing is a powerful tool to remove roadblocks, amplify your value proposition, and multiply your existing sales efforts.
At every stage of the sales cycle, marketing has the potential to help you increase sales.
Every sales-driven organization follows a sales cycle, whether they do so formally or not. Depending on the organization and its solutions, this process can take hours to years. Regardless of the timeframe, marketing can come alongside your salesforce to make them more effective. Using a 6-stage sales cycle model, we explain how. If your current marketing strategy doesn't consider each stage, you are likely missing out on opportunities.
- Prospecting
What it is: Prospecting is making contact with potential clients.
How Marketing helps: Increase the number of prospects through solid website search engine optimization, social media, print advertising, PR, and effective tradeshow marketing. With marketing, you can free your sales force from spending a significant portion of their time prospecting. Instead, dedicate their efforts to the other stages of the sales cycle. - Lead Qualification
What it is: This is a discovery process of finding out if a prospect has a budget and is a good fit for your products or services before proceeding along the sales cycle.
How Marketing helps: The most effective marketing helps leads self-qualify so you don't waste precious resources selling to companies that can't or won't buy your products or services. It establishes clear expectations and lets prospects know if you will or will not be able to meet their requirements. That said, it is important to not over-qualify with marketing when effective sales staff can persuade individuals to rethink their budgets or requirements. At Stratimar, we believe qualified leads generated are a superior measurement of marketing effectiveness than initial contacts or prospects. - Presentation and Proposal
What it is: Proposal is both presenting a solution and establishing a price.
How Marketing helps: Price only matters if you can't see the value. Marketing can help design effective presentations and proposals to ensure that even if your staff can't get in front of all the decision-makers, your message and your value can.
- Negotiation
What it is: Negotiation is the process of refining the solution, its budget requirements, and the implementation timeframe.
How Marketing helps: For many B2B companies, this is often the stage that takes the longest. Sales cycles can drag along for months or years. Marketing can help in 2 ways: First, through social media, email marketing, and other initiatives, you can continue to stay in touch with your leads without tying up most of your sales resources. Second, you can arm your sales force with materials that give them an excuse to make contact with leads and keep projects moving along. - Closing
What it is: Closing is getting the signature and turning leads into customers
How Marketing helps: If sales and marketing have done their jobs in the earlier stages, this process is relatively straightforward. If you are struggling to close deals, typically there is an issue in an earlier stage that needs to be addressed. At this point, marketing switches from customer acquisition to customer retention. - Retention
What it is: Retention is about ensuring customers continually understand your value and are constantly aware of your latest product or service offering.
How Marketing helps: It is much easier and more cost-effective to market to current customers than acquire new ones. Through social media, website content, customer portals, email marketing, and more, marketing can keep you in touch with your customer base so that your sales staff can focus on converting leads to customers. By continually reinforcing your value to your customer base, you are less likely to lose clients to competitors who may understate or misrepresent the value of your products or services.
Want to learn more about Stratimar?
Let's talk about your sales cycle and where you could use help. Our experts and strategists have spent their careers helping businesses shorten sales cycles and close more deals. Contact Stratimar today.
