Sales & Marketing Effectiveness for Sustained Growth

Getting New Business: Adapting to Current Market Conditions

Guest Author - Richard G. Melecki

 
In virtually every industry today, businesses have to do more with less.  This includes all of the marketing activities necessary to get new business in a challenging economy. 

In past recessions, marketers have concentrated their efforts on market segments, geographies, and customers which have proven profitable in the past.  But the current world economic situation is changing virtually every market.  Just doing what worked in the past to acquire new business risks wasting scarce marketing dollars and increasing your cost of new business acquisition.

To reduce your marketing costs and to increase your return on dollars spent to get new business, follow these steps:

1. Examine every current geographic market, market segment, and customer to determine if they are in fact viable prospects in the current economy.  Ask yourself how your products and services might sell in markets and in geographies you have not previously served.

2. Concentrate on no more than one to three profitable markets or market segments at any given time.  Like an army on the attack, your business must achieve strategic focus in order to maximize the use of scarce resources.

3. Fine tune your product/service design and your pricing strategy for each market in which you do business. 

4. Make sure you have identified the real buyers in each market segment.  Buyers are individuals who have the authority to make purchase decisions and who own the budgets used to make the purchase.  Concentrate your marketing and sales efforts on reaching these individuals.

5. Profile each buyer type for every one of your products.  At a minimum you should know their titles, their professional background, how they find out about products and services like yours, and how they make purchase decisions.

6. Use communication channels that have the best chance of reaching buyers for the least cost.  Active business acquisition methods, such as business-to-business referrals, direct mail/e-mail, and cold calling usually are the most cost effective.  Other less direct methods, including Internet and print advertising, can also prove effective if selected carefully to reach your targeted buyer

For more information, feel free to contact:
MPI Achieve, Ltd.
330-622-4038
info@mpiachieve.com
http://www.MPIAchieve.com

Retain and Grow Market Share - a Major 2009 Marketing Mandate

According to the 2009 Marketing Outlook Survey, the largest independent assessment of senior marketing executives today, conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, an astounding 48% of marketing respondents indicated that “senior management is mandating that marketing contribute to the bottom line by retaining and growing market share.”

Great directive, as this will increase profitability. But, after 20 years of conducting comprehensive Market Analysis projects for all types of companies, I find that too many companies base their market share knowledge on “gut feelings” instead of a real analysis.

For example, I hear explanations like “We’ve been in business for 50 years, and everyone who needs our product knows us, so we feel we have a big share of the market”. 

This is almost always not true. Just because a consumer, whether it be B2B or B2C knows a company or their brand doesn’t mean they will purchase nor does it mean they are a qualified prospect. Branding does not equal sales or effective lead generation. And, it does not enable you to retain or grow market share. 

I have yet to run a basic analysis for any company and not found at least 30% more prospects than their sales reps were contacting.  Plus, this missed 30% were prospects like their best customers – not just anybody qualified for their product. More . .

It’s one thing to have a feeling for how your company has penetrated a given market. It is quite another thing to actually analyze and understand your share and potential, then see the results on maps and charts, and be able to effectively act upon the information. Unfortunately, many companies, even large ones, don’t have the internal expertise or resources to effectively perform the necessary analysis. 
   
You Can’t Retain or Grow What You Don’t Know
 
Before you can retain and grow market share, you must first thoroughly analyze and understand your current share and potential.  You must be able to, at least, answer the following basic questions:

* How much of the market currently belongs to you?
* How much more is out there?
* How profitable are your existing customers? 
* Which existing customers are the most and least profitable?
* Who are your most profitable prospects? 
* How do you get a bigger share of current customers, profitable prospects and market? 

For those marketers who are looking for ways to retain and grow market share, I invite you to visit the following sites for advice and solutions:

Market Analysis - previous blog on topic
Want to analyze your market share and potential?  Contact us info@infogrowcorp.com

Driving Sales & Marketing Effectiveness with Customer and Prospect Proximity Reports

One of the most beneficial pieces of knowledge marketers can have is knowing where your customers and prospects are located in relation to your stores, branches, or distributors. Recognizing where your customers and prospects come from and how far they are willing to travel for your specific product or service adds considerable precision to your targeted marketing efforts.

Proximity knowledge is also the first step toward understanding your trade areas plus driving more business to your physical locations. Learn More

Ordinarily I don’t directly promote InfoGrow’s services on this blog but, in this case, I made an exception. Why? Because I keep seeing marketers in both the B2B and B2C industries save time, save money and win more sales by using our Proximity Reports – Plus tool and felt my readers should know about these benefits. 

Proximity Reports – Plus is a web service that provides quick, accurate, inexpensive, pay-as-you-go reports that append your closest locations, by air miles, to your customer/prospect records.  It can be the closest one location or all of your locations within your specified radius and maps can be added to the reports. 

Various Industry Applications

Commercial Printers / Ad Agencies / Marketing Consultants
Often, these groups are in charge of their clients’ direct mail programs.  Using the Proximity Reports - Plus tool they can match clients’ customer/prospect locations to their clients’ locations.  This information enables them to easily add their clients’ closest addresses to their mailers, which steers more customers and prospects to their clients’ physical sites, increases the marketing campaign ROI, plus boosts their value to their clients.   

Chain Retailers and Franchises  
Businesses such as restaurants, beauty salons, tax services, grocery stores, and many others, use Proximity Reports – Plus to tailor their in-house direct mail content. By understanding customer and prospect proximity, they can include local information such as: closest addresses, hours, phone numbers, coupons, and special promotions or events. Proximity knowledge enables them to improve foot traffic and drive revenue. 

Banks/ Hotel Chains/ Healthcare Providers
Service companies, such as the above and others, that are trying to win new national accounts often need to respond to RFPs (Requests for Proposals) from prospective clients. These RFPs usually include their ability to show that their locations are in a convenient proximity to the prospect’s locations, proving they can effectively meet coverage needs.  Proximity Reports – Plus accelerates the process by delivering immediate, accurate on-line proximity reports into their sales reps’ hands, providing a competitive advantage and more corporate account sales. 

Real-Life Examples

Huddle, Inc. - Huddle is a marketing company that specializes in helping national retailers, through their High School Ticket Program, to connect  with the local high school marketplace.  They currently uses Proximity Reports – Plus to localize the match of these retailers to specific schools. See Press Release  

Grainger, Inc. - Grainger is the leading broad-line supplier of facilities maintenance products serving business and institutions in North America.  A recent promotional mailer that I received from Grainger, included their 2 closest locations to my address.  It localized the marketing campaign for them and provided convenience to me. See the following example.  

Try Proximity Reports – Plus Demo
Think about your own possible applications and benefits.  Then, see how easy it is to use our on-line Proximity Reports – Plus tool to help you develop effective target marketing campaigns, assess new opportunities and increase your marketing ROI. 

Number One Marketing Tip for Any Economy

Over the past several months, I’m sure you’ve read more than your share of tips and advice on how to market during a recession, depression, tough economy or whatever term best defines our current economic state.  Much of this advice is valuable and can possibly help you hang on and, just maybe, pull yourself up above our current sales and marketing doom and gloom. 

Yet, if you were to ask me - as I asked myself - what is the top marketing tip, the number one piece of marketing advice that I would offer to B2B marketers in 2009, or anytime, it is this:

Know Your Best Customers

Why?  Think about the following: 

• Your best customers are the foundation of your current and future success – your key to success in any economy, good or bad. 

• If you lose just 3 of your best customers, how would that impact your profits; indeed the very life of your company? 

• Your best customers were probably once your best prospects and it is likely much of your marketing strategies and efforts were built around finding and attracting them. 

• Current and past studies show that it costs about five times as much to attract a new customer as it costs to keep an old one. Chances are, most of your old customers include many of your best customers.

• Best customers provide cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.  If you know them, you’re aware (or should be) of their other departments/divisions/units that may need what you have to offer. 

• Without knowing your best customers, you can’t effectively retain them, keep them loyal or turn them into advocates and referrals for your company.

• If you don’t know your best customers, you don’t know your best prospects and, therefore, don’t know how to effectively find and add more best customers. 

•  Best customer knowledge provides the vital focus of your campaigns, messages and sales reps. 

Knowing

Some people ask me, what does “knowing” your best customers really mean? It means finding every piece of vital information about their company that might help you to build, solidify, keep, and leverage your current relationship with them to find more customers like them.

Knowing your best customers is much more than a simple spreadsheet of your key customers’ names, addresses and phone numbers. Everybody has that basic information. It is learning all you can about them and includes details such as: their primary and related products/services; what they buy from you and how often; their annual revenue, employee size, SIC code; their parent company, divisions/units; their market share and current industry challenges; how often you communicate with them and their preferred method; what else they should be buying from you.  The list goes on and on and on.  You can find a more complete list here.

Whether your recession marketing strategies are customer retention, customer acquisition, or a combination and regardless of your various media choices such as; SEO, Direct Mail/Print Marketing, Internet Marketing, Tradeshows, Public Relations, Social Networking, Mass Advertising, or others…without a best customer focus, chances are you’ll be hanging by a thread from your 2009 marketing efforts.  Or just hanging out.  

Best customers are your sales and marketing treasure map to your best prospects and if you read it accurately, you’ll get to the right destination - your next best customers. 

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Cure “Deal-Blindness” by Applying a Territory or Account Map

As year-end looms and next year’s quota is just a dream (but sure to be even bigger), sales reps are caught in the vice of big territories, big numbers, and little time. As a result, most reps are forced to be entirely opportunistic, preventing them from ever deeply penetrating their territory or major accounts. The focus on quick wins leaves millions of dollars on the table. Yet, many organizations get caught in “deal-blindness” - an affliction that hits every three months no matter how many vitamins you take!  Similar to snow-blindness, your organization may be so hyper focused on just this month’s or this quarters deals, that you only have a handle on just a small portion of any given territory or account.  You get stuck in the places you know well, without ever getting a handle on where you could or should be throughout the territory or major account. 

So as you focus on winding up this year, and begin to think about setting next year’s quotas, you might want to think about how badly your organization suffers from “deal-blindness.”  What are some of the symptoms?

• Deals come from predictable areas, with major pieces of the territory untouched
• Revenue is coming from only 1 division or department in a major account, relying on only 1 or 2 internal relationships
• Your “global” account” is actually only generating revenue from 2 or 3 countries, merely scratching the surface of global potential
• Your reps are pushing for lower pricing, while at the same time there is a low influx of net new opportunities being generated within their territory

The reason that many organizations have some of the issues above is that quota pressure pushes reps into focusing on “what can I close today or this month?”  Rather than really analyzing, thinking through and building a set of defined objectives, strategies and action plans to map their way to more fully realized territory or major account.

What if you could see a visual of your territory that plotted all your existing accounts, your pipeline accounts, and those similar companies across your entire territory that you haven’t touched yet?  Instead of working every lead that comes your way (even the ones that aren’t a fit), consider what it would be like to have the ability to make clear choices on where you’d spend your time, who you spent it on, with action plans to drive execution.  In effect, using tools like territory and account planning and mapping plots the map to not only meeting your quota, but builds insurance so you can exceed it, AND prime the pump effectively for next year.

Territory or account planning provides a set of tools that will enable sales reps to effectively & efficiently penetrate their assigned territory or major accounts.  It allows reps and sales managers to leverage resources to achieve the greatest gains from territories or major accounts.  And it enables Sales Management to consistently evaluate the effectiveness of the territory or account strategies selected and executed.  A territory or account plan and map drives success through 5 key elements:

1. Analyze The Territory Or Major Account
2. Make Informed Choices of the Best Targets/Strategies
3. Build Targeted Objectives & Actions
4. Work The Defined Plan
5. Manage To The Plan

Without a plan and a defined process and tools to create one, millions of dollars are left on the table by corporations and their sales people. Territory and account planning bring much needed strategy to “tactics-only” reps. Opportunistic selling can only take you so far. Creating and documenting a strategy with an action plan provides the means to ‘work the plan’ for deeper and more focused revenue generation.” 

So if you want to cure “deal-blindness”, consider implementing a territory or major account planning and mapping process.  Without a map, any road can get you somewhere.  With one, you can get directly to where you want to be, and know what that destination is in advance.

By Lisa Dennis - About this Author
President, Knowledgence Associates
ldennis@Knowledgence.com

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What Every Marketer Must Know About Their Best Customers

As a marketer, how much do you really know about your best customers?  How much more should you know in order to retain them and find more like them?

I’ve posted several times about the importance of complete current top customer knowledge, Too Many Marketers Have Too Little Customer Knowledge and What You Don't Know About Your Best Customers Equals What You Don't Know About Your Best Prospects .

I can’t stress this enough because without knowing your best customers, you and your sales reps are just floundering when it comes to effective lead generation and customer retention. It’s like trying to catch a fish without the right lures or equipment. You probably won’t catch what you want.   

Most sales & marketing experts will agree that defining your best prospects and retaining your best customers hinges on what you actually know about those current best customers. They are the key to a successful business future. If you don’t know them, you don’t know enough.

So, how much do you know about your best customers and how much more should you know? 

Here is a list of vital key customer knowledge that every marketer should be gathering and leveraging to keep their best customers and find more like them. 

• Correct Name (seems simple, but think of how many different ways the same company is spelled and entered into your systems)
• HQ address and other location addresses – plants, service points, etc. 
• Phone, Fax, Website, Email
• Primary SIC code, and secondary if applicable
• Industry Segment (your classification for analysis)
• Annual revenue
• Employee size
• Number of years in business
• Parent company (if any) and applicable information about them
• Company divisions or units, if any, how many and what products do each sell 
• Merger and acquisition history
• Partners and affiliations
• Major customers
• Primary products and other related products
• Product (s) they buy from you
• What other products might they use from you?  Which department/division/units might use your products, contact names, and will your current contact refer
• How often they buy from you
• Why they buy from you – price, quality, service, locations, effective communication, or other
• How much of their total last year revenue was influenced by your product
• How often you communicate with them and the method they prefer
• Their current market share
• Their major competitors and their competitors’ current market share
• What competitors do you sell to, what products, how much
• Your share of customer wallet, share of competitor wallet and potential for each
• Their current industry challenges
• Their latest press releases and newsletters, plus external news on them
• Trade publications the decision makers read/subscribe to
• Lead Source – what lead source did they originate from
• Outstanding proposals you have with them
• Decision maker/Contact for each key account/division/unit, the product sold to those, along with titles, email, phone extensions for each and personal interests
• Influencers to the decision makers, along with their contact information

I encourage everybody to comment and / or add to this list.  Perhaps, together, we can build a very effective type of “Vital Best Customer Knowledge List” for the benefit of all marketers. 

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