Sales & Marketing
At Silico, we provide excellent sales and marketing services across India. The marketing process is focused on familiarizing your brand and product with new customers or refamiliarizing it with former ones. Organizations who are coming up with new ways to market themselves need to clearly explain what their product or service is, how it solves an issue for the consumer and its price points. From there, the marketing team needs to determine who is most likely interested in this product or service and where they can find them.
Now that you know what marketing is, it’ll be easier for you to understand and follow the steps to devise successful marketing strategies. A successful marketing strategy is directly correlated to the revenue generated. Therefore, the profits of a company are largely credited to a well-implemented marketing strategy.
Here are the common steps that businesses undertake to develop a marketing strategy for their product or services.
Market Research
Conducting extensive market research helps gauge the wants and needs of the customers. Through market research, a company collects information about the buying behaviours, patterns, cultural beliefs, and others of customers, which then can be translated into the product.
Recognizing Target Customers
Every product or service has a target customer base. For instance, face tints will only be used by urban women in their early-20s or late 30s. This understanding will help in devising a marketing strategy that caters to the target audience. Top courses in sales and marketing can help you understand the importance of target audience in the best way.
Identifying Unique Selling Proposition
USP or unique selling proposition is the factor that makes a product or service stand out. It is crucial for businesses to recognise the USP of their products and services and communicate the same to their target audience through marketing campaigns.
Developing a Brand
A brand is defined as – a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name. A brand is unique to a product, and it distinguishes one brand’s product from the other.
Choosing Right Marketing Channels
A marketing channel is a medium through which the customers learn about a new product. It can be a print advertisement, a TV commercial or a Facebook ad. Depending on the target audience and type of product, it is important to choose the right marketing channel.
Exceptional After-Sales Services
Marketing is an ongoing business activity. It does not merely encapsulate selling products, but it also involves after-sales services. Communicating with the customers is the key to customer loyalty.
Monitoring and Reviewing
Marketing strategies require constant monitoring and reviewing. It allows businesses to make effective changes.
Now that we have gotten an idea about marketing and creating marketing strategies, it is important to have a thorough understanding of sales. Let’s delve deeper into understanding what is sales and how to increase the same.
What is Sales?
A sale takes place when a buyer purchases tangible or intangible commodities from a seller.
It involves the passing of ownership from the seller to the buyer and relies mainly on the trust that the latter has in the former. Sales is a competitive activity and may involve middlemen like salespeople, retailers, wholesalers, etc. It can either be a contract between a buyer and seller or a process in which a salesperson sells different products.
How to Increase Sales?
Besides marketing, boosting sales is a crucial function for any organisation. However, the degree of difficulty in increasing sales may vary across different industries and companies. Here are some of the ways in which companies can boost their sales.
Setting Goals: During the incubation of a product, setting a specific goal will help in maximising investments. It is imperative to set business goals that are achievable.
Analyse Previous Sales: Analysing past sales records helps gauge the company’s performance. It also helps in evaluating gaps and mistakes made in the past that can be corrected in the future.
Evaluating Target Audience: Understanding the target audience is one of the most important steps of the selling process. Evaluating the likes and dislikes of the customers and implementing them in the products boosts sales. It also increases customer satisfaction, which leads to customer loyalty.
Implementing Marketing Strategies: A proper marketing strategy boosts the visibility of the business. Marketing is a business function that educates the buyers about products. Therefore, a good marketing strategy can increase sales.
What is marketing?
Marketing consists of strategies and processes that generate prospects for the sales team and customers for the business as a whole. Marketers help their business reach new people, turn them into high-quality leads and drive demand for products or services. They also communicate with customers to make them aware of the latest products and features, both to promote these updates and to act as guides.
The marketing department has a key role in supporting sales by reaching many target customers at once. To do so, marketers focus on:
Market and audience research so they can understand what target customers are doing to solve their challenges and pain points
Lead generation strategies across a range of channels
Long-term efforts to build a recognizable brand and raise awareness of it
Sales and marketing play important roles for each other and for the business, but the way they do it is different. That’s what we’re diving into next.
What is the difference between sales and marketing?
What makes sales and marketing different? Let’s look into specifics: goals, processes, roles, day-to-day tasks and tools.
Sales and marketing goals
Measurable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to making both marketing and sales teams successful. Here’s what goals mean for each department.
In sales, the ultimate goal is to drive revenue. Everything sales reps do, as well as many of their performance quotas, is tied to the bottom line. Here are some ways to format your revenue goals:
Total revenue per quarter/year
Revenue per year/quarter per sales rep
Average purchase value, or the average amount earned per transaction
Customer lifetime value (LTV), or the total revenue you can expect from a customer account
High-achieving sales teams go beyond revenue goals. First, they break up those goals into sales activities they need to take to achieve them, such as making cold calls, following up over email, sending proposals and more. Then, as part of their sales strategy, they set daily and weekly sales goals for each of those activities.
This is called activity-based selling and it gives sales teams control over their impact on a company’s bottom line.
In marketing, the aim is to provide sales with the best leads possible, to encourage people to become customers or to retain existing customers. Unlike sales, this is rarely done in direct communication with leads and customers.
Their goals can be sorted into awareness, engagement, conversion and retention. Here are examples of indicators marketing professionals can use to measure success.
Awareness: Website traffic, social media reach, video views, podcast listens, press mentions
Engagement: Social media shares, likes and comments, website visit length, pageviews per visit
Conversion: Free resource downloads, webinar signups, contact form completions, newsletter signups, purchases (for products/services that can be purchased without an interaction with a sales rep)
Retention: Engagement and conversions from existing customers, customer reviews
Processes, sales pipelines and marketing funnels
Pipelines are a great way to visualize your process. Getting quality leads and prospects into your pipeline and moving them efficiently through each stage of the customer journey is the key to driving revenue and hitting targets.
A sales pipeline is an organized, visual way of tracking multiple potential buyers through the stages of your sales process. Most companies will have some version of these stages in their sales pipeline:
Prospecting
Qualifying
Contacting
Building relationships
Closing
Following up with leads that went cold
A sales pipeline is a useful tool when it comes to activity-based selling. Each stage defines a set of activities a rep needs to take to move a prospect to the next stage.
As a result, reps follow a sales process: a step-by-step formula that outlines all the activities they need to do to close a deal. This typically includes finding and qualifying prospects, reaching out, giving a presentation, closing the deal and, sometimes, retaining the customer.