The world is competitive and getting more competitive too. Whether you’re in e-commerce, services, product businesses, end-user or B2B it won’t have escaped your notice that for the most part, you’ll be competing with other businesses for potentially the same audience and share of mind, not to mention wallet. So, what can businesses do to keep growing, keep winning new customers and ultimately win in the digital world?
In this blog, we’re bringing you our top resolutions that Sales and Marketing teams should be making (and keeping) to stay ahead in 2022.
First and foremost, whatever you’re doing across marketing and sales, get super clear on your goals. You probably wouldn’t hire a new salesperson without knowing what you needed them to deliver right? The same goes for any Sales and Marketing activity you’re running. Getting crystal clear on your goals across all channels will help you point your team or marketing agency in the right direction and let you measure and monitor activity against business goals. This applies to Content, Branding and Creative as well as Acquisition programs – for example, if you’re building a new content series be clear with your team or marketing agency who this is for, why, and what your expectations are in terms of distribution, penetration, and results. Staying really clear on your goals, as well as helping you create clearer direction for your teams will also help drive the shape and skill sets within them – keeping you one step ahead of the competition too.
This is one of our favourite things to do at The Demand Generation Team – and it’s an ideal exercise to take with any new marketing. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what’s going on outside of your business – why are they making a change, a purchase, or an enquiry? Where are they likely to go next? And most importantly once you’ve taken these steps in their shoes think laterally about where, when, and why to apply your newfound insight.
All too often Sales and Marketing teams just don’t talk enough, ok so they may be best friends over coffee, but we mean really talking about the interconnect between sales and marketing. At least once a quarter have your teams specifically meet to talk through everything from the quality of opportunities and good/bad/ugly elements on both teams. Just knowing what’s coming up and what’s exciting in each team will help the other to understand and engage better externally too. The same goes for larger teams where multiple disciplines are involved or if you’re working with external marketing agencies then get them to share with you their forward-thinking plans to help everyone move at the same speed and in the same direction.
Our favourite! Data! Data is such a massive part of a modern sales and marketing team and yet so many organisations still don’t have a full handle on data. Without good quality data your business will be lacking insight and potentially losing revenue on missed opportunities so take time this year to collectively think on all the areas of data that could and should provide your business with a competitive advantage. That might be clearing up CRM and refining any automation programs you have running, it could even be getting a better handle on your PPC and Advertising performance – perhaps mapping further down the funnel than you have previously, or it might be about tying all elements of your data estate together to give you a clearer picture on performance. Wherever you look to improve your data set, clear steps internally to continue to assess and refine your performance, after all, an insight that drives performance is what good data should do. If we can help support any of your data ambitions then get in touch – we’d love to chat.
If you’re not here already then this should be top of your wish list. Your customers regardless of industry or sector are more mobile than they ever have been before and that doesn’t just apply to web activity. The way that we and therefore your customers communicate and interact with businesses has changed dramatically. We’ll recognise the emergence of video as a key collaboration tool, chat as a pure play lead generation tool and the shift to mobile browsing and it goes further. Customers expect what they need on-demand and it’s just not good enough to see breaks in the chain, slow service, and inflexible ways of working so take a good look at the way in which your customers are working (or not working) with you to identify new opportunities for growth.
No one likes to fail but in Sales and Marketing, it’s an inevitable part of building great performance. In fact, it’s absolutely necessary to fail if you’re going to start improving performance. So, this year and beyond look for opportunities to compare performance quickly and ditch lower-performing channels, ads, campaigns as quickly as possible in favour of better performance. At The Demand Generation Team, we recommend building testing programs to assess your audience’s reaction to any new message, product, or campaign before committing huge resources to them. Knowing if and how your audiences respond to your brand before you invest significantly in larger, more expansive campaigns can help your business save significantly on wasted campaigns as well as drive better performance quicker too.
Unless you’re just launching a new brand (and even if you are), take the time this year to reassess how your brand is engaging and connecting with your audience. Just because “it’s working” or “it’s done” doesn’t mean there isn’t more than your brand could be doing for you and your business, especially in terms of driving opportunities.
Take stock of how your external brand message relates to how your sales team and marketing team communicate your values. Is it time to update your vision, mission or values and start to attract a broader customer range? or just do some housekeeping on the way you present yourselves both internally and externally.
We could all do to benefit from new skills but recent research suggests that the skills gap especially in marketing is very real – in fact, according to the MarTech Alliance and Upwork (https://www.martechalliance.com/stories/upwork-reveals-2022s-most-in-demand-skills-for-technology-marketing-and-customer-service-independent-talent) only 28% of marketers viewed their in house talent as trained and working well – a pretty damning view but not one that can’t be solved. Whilst marketing agencies like The Demand Generation Team are constantly building new skills to create better performance, in house teams could and should commit to ensuring their teams are consistently growing their own skills too.
Resolutions are a bit like yesterday’s newspaper for many of us – useful today and gone by the time the clock strikes 7pm but they don’t have to be that way – in this blog, we’ve shared just some of the best practices that Sales and Marketing teams should be working to every day. If these or any other areas of marketing is on your mind – drop us a line below, we’d love to help.
Posted by Xena Graham on Tuesday 25th January 2022
