In this post I look at the most important questions to ask your sales and marketing department in order to help you to create and implement a long term sales plan.
As a brand strategy agency, we find that too often businesses spend good money after bad chasing short-term marketing objectives which result in chaotic sales.
They then spend lots of time designing a lovely piece of collateral that looks great but doesn’t do the job it is intended to do. Often this is because too little information has passed through the business to create a cohesive long term plan of action that has all stakeholders backing the structure, process and reason.
Here are 30 questions for your sales and marketing department that will open up a lot of discussion. Some of these you will be able to answer easily, some maybe less so. The questions are a guide only to help open the conversation around what you are saying within your sales and marketing processes.
Have we got a one-, three- and five-year sales plan?
Does our marketing and branding build towards those business objectives?
Have we got a year one-, three- and five-year brand directive to support that?
Have we defined what our perfect client looks like and why they would work with us?
Do we know the size of clients we need to win to hit our targets?
Do we know how many of those client we need to win to hit our targets?
Have we a clearly defined ‘why us?’ message that stands us out from the competition?
Does our message disempower the competition?
Does our message complement our company ethic and culture?
Is our marketing written from a features or benefits perspective?
Are we clearly communicating our key messaging and benefits to the market?
Do our sales people understand our key message?
Have we looked at internal processes that could/should support the key message?
Are we using the same marketing structure as we did last year?
Where can we improve?
How many wasted meetings/tenders/briefs did we attend last year?
What is our current new business win ratio?
How many different ways of marketing are we using?
Have we strategies behind every marketing and sales process?
Do we regularly review their success and failure rates?
When did we last review our competitors?
When was the last time we looked at new competitors in the market?
When was the last time we reviewed their messaging?
How big is our pipeline?
How much of that is over a year old?
Have we discussed and shared our sales process with the marketing guys to ensure we are supporting them as much as we can?
When was the last time we asked our clients for referrals?
When was the last time we went back to our existing clients to see if we can offer them additional services or products?
When was the last time we went back to our existing clients to ask where we could improve our products/services?
Have we broken this down into a list of weekly targets and actions that are achievable?
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