Pursuing sales without a marketing strategy is like setting off on a long country drive with only a quarter of a tank of petrol. You might get some of the way there, but you certainly won’t reach your intended destination. And you might find yourself lost in the wilderness…
It is an unfortunate truth that marketing is one of the least understood professional disciplines.
Most SMBs don’t have access to true strategy to guide their marketing. Instead, they pull tactical levers and hope, which produces sporadic success and drains budgets. It’s no wonder sales is often prioritised over marketing under these circumstances.
But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Working with a marketing strategist helps businesses avoid knee-jerk tactics by connecting their marketing plans to business goals. Supported by decades of experience working with hundreds of businesses, our insights-led framework helps SMBs follow a proven methodology to build capability and performance across the core strategic areas of marketing and sales, ensuring they are working together.
Here are just a few reasons why marketing and sales need to complement and support each other in tandem to get the best results:
Marketing allows you to target customers at scale
Even with the highest-performing salesperson working for your business, there are limits to what they can achieve. Telesales and face to face selling definitely have a place, but to achieve significant business growth, your message needs to reach groups of potential customers in an efficient and effective manner. By using the right channel strategy targeted to key stakeholders, a marketing strategy can deliver customer volume in a way no sales team ever could.
Marketing allows sales teams to focus on what they do best
Which is converting new leads into revenue. When a marketing strategy is delivering a steady stream of high quality leads into the business, the sales team can focus on conversion, as opposed to attraction and acquisition. With a structured buyer’s journey where marketing and sales each have key responsibilities and support customers at key points in the process, the experience will be better and less leads will fall through the cracks.
Marketing builds a stable pipeline of new business.
A structured marketing program can make it easier to forecast and develop targets for new business. Without a calendar of marketing initiatives to capitalise on opportunities and balance out seasonality, a pipeline based on sales activity alone could look lumpy, making managing cash flow and customer service tricky. A marketing strategy tied to performance metrics will give you the best chance at achieving the growth you seek, while also allowing you to put a plan in place to manage it.
N.B. Strategy’s Customerit Growth Program makes marketing transparent, proactive and a key driver for future growth. To find out how N.B. Strategy can support your business, get in touch with our team for an initial discussion.
