All marketers should experience sales

What do I mean by that?  It’s simple — those of us who are marketers by trade, whether as a manager, in promotions, creative, product management, advertising or public relations, should walk in the shoes of our salespeople, either inside or outside.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have sales experience and find it extremely valuable when undertaking marketing roles and initiatives.  I draw on the “how can this be sold” philosophy and envision how either the product or service would be presented to the prospect.  More importantly, how will it fulfill a need the prospect would have?

Salespeople are classified into two primary categories:  hunters and farmers.  Hunters are the new business developers.  Farmers are the account managers, cultivating current business.  Each has their place with each position requiring certain skill sets and personal attributes.  I would suspect most marketers are more suited toward farming that hunting, but again, I said most, not all.  Hunting requires more time and a far thicker skin since a prospect’s door closes more often than it opens. 

But as a marketer, consider experiencing the sales process first-hand.  Even if it is accompanying a salesperson on a call, get a taste of what it’s like in the field.  You’ll be a better marketer for it.

Keep marketing!

One fatal mistake any business can make is to stop their marketing efforts, either dead cold or in a drastic reduction.  While the sales pipeline might be tighter (clogged, some would say), you still need to pump promotional dollars to keep your cash flow moving, pay expenses and frankly, survive.  This topic has been discussed for nearly a year and we saw what happened with advertising dollars starting in the fourth quarter of 2008.  They practically disappeard.

Be smart.  Stay the course to keep your business in a position to thrive when things improve.  As with my last post, it’s even more important now to track — and track accurately — what is driving business through your doors.  Treat  your marketing budiget as an investment, not an expense.  An investment should be monitored, with a close eye on its financial return.  You wouldn’t put money into say a mutual fund, and forget about it (or perhaps you did and lost your shirt or blouse several months ago), but instead, look at the numbers, up or down.  All financial advisors will tell you the same thing:  stay the course for the long term.  Your marketing budget should stay the same course and weather the long haul. 

Stay focused and plug away.  There are great opportunities out there to save on advertising and marketing costs as media companies deal with unsold inventory, air time and pages.  If you’ve tracked well, you can look to invest where the payback is best, and save money in the process.

How competitive are you willing to be?

While the economy continues to lag in getting to or even begin to recover, corporations and business owners who want to keep their share of the customer’s wallet or make a bold move to gain market share from their competitors need to make a decision, if they haven’t done so already, on how competitive they are going to be in the marketplace.  Experience shows that customers, either consumers or B2B, will respond to strong offers and opportunities for savings (either actual or implied). 

Most will consider “strong” to be a price discount or sale.  How long can we go is one train of thought.  I always recommend looking at other ways of packaging or bundling offers to avoid the price reduction.  Looking at premiums, free services, extended free warranties or another method that keeps the product price intact is more favorable and protects margin.

Whichever strong offer is created, the length of time for the offer is critical.  Don’t drag it out!  Keep it focused, brief and concise.  This generates a call to action, i.e. getting a prospective customer to make a call, place an order over the Web or drive to the location to shop. 

Experiment with different offers.  Keep them fresh.  Don’t overuse them — I wouldn’t repeat an offer more than a maximum of once per quarter.  Keep track of what offers drive response and sales, and what channels generate the most sales, the most profitable sales AND the least overall response.

Measure the profitability and margins.  Better business intelligence helps you effectively manage your marketing efforts.  Develop, test, track and revise as necessary.

Compete to win.  Customers expect it.  They will expect it for a long time, even after the economy begins to turn around.

What information should I capture from a sale?

Over a few cocktails recently, a friend of a friend joined us at our table for some pleasantries.  Eventually the conversation turned toward business and the general state of the economy.  This friend-friend was talking about his retail store, a hobby shop of sorts, and something he had read recently about the importance for retailers to capture sales information in order to sell more to those customers.

He said it never dawned on him to think about tracking information, relying instead on a consistent media schedule to drive traffic to his store and hoping for word-of-mouth referrals for additional buyers.  Fortunately, I gave him a few pointers and I thought, hey I’m going to share this on my blog.  So here goes.

There are different pieces of information you should and can record on buyers.  The most elementary are their name and address.  With the advent of new technology and marketing tools, recording their email address will allow you to communicate with them frequently for a low monetary investment.  The caveat to remember is being clear to the customer that their email address will not be used for anything other than communications from your business.  Period.

With name and address information at least, add the sales-related information such as a product, or at least product category, along with the date of the sale, the dollar amount and perhaps other information such as method of payment.  Think of this process as continuing to build a snapshot of what comprises your customer base.  The most important piece of data to make every effort to capture is the SOURCE OF THE SALE!  If you are a business owner, retailer or not, with marketing expenditures, one major focus of your operation is to identify what ads, offers, prices or merchandise drove response and generated sales.  If you don’t, it’s like putting money into an investment and hoping it pays off but you don’t monitor its returns.  For some of us, we know how that turned out, don’t we?

Much of this information is already stored in your point-of-sale system in your store.  However, it may not be readily available if the POS system does not allow access to this data in a way that you can use it to analyze your customers.  If not, start building your database with every single piece of sales paper you might have, even that information that may be older, say back two to three years.  Take a software program such as Microsoft Access (some will even use Excel) to enter in customer sales information.  The time and effort is well worth it because as your build your file, you’ll be uncovering opportunities to sell more product to those people who already have an affinity for your store. 

Look to capture this information:

Name/Address/City/State/Zip/Phone
Gender
Email
Product Purchased
Dollars Spent
Sale Date
Payment Method
Source of Sale

When you start your customer file, you will begin to identify multi-buyers, those people who have purchased either multiple times from you or bought more than one product, or both.  You’ll see the geographic areas that are producing sales.  You’ll know your average sales ticket and have a better idea of what products sell, and perhaps when, if they have a seasonality to them.

The more you know, the better you can market your business.  Capture data, build your database and educate yourself on who your customers are and where they come from.  Education pays dividends!