Nowadays, marketing teams have more pressure placed on their shoulders than ever before. Competition is fierce and various mediums and strategies are available for businesses in terms of advertising in a professional services environment. One thing you can never afford to do is remain stagnant. If you are to achieve a high-level ROI from your marketing campaigns, your sales and marketing teams need to work together to move forward. In this article, we will take a look at how you can leverage your salesforce to drive campaign performance in further detail.
Clear articulation of ROI
There is only one place to begin, and this is by making sure that all business campaigns have a clear articulation of ROI from the beginning. It doesn’t matter whether this is a soft ROI, for example, brand building, or a hard ROI, for example, incremental sales; it needs to be set out in concrete detail from the very start. This is so all sales team members know exactly what they are supposed to be working toward and they can track the project while it is being undertaken to make sure that everything is on track. There are a number of different ways that your ROI objectives can be set. A lot of businesses like to use the SMART method. SMART stands for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. Let’s take a look at each one in further depth…
- Specific – There is no point in setting a generic goal, especially when it comes to ROI. Your sales force need specific targets and objectives to work towards.
- Measurable – When a goal is measurable, you can determine exactly when it has been reached. A simple example of this is selling more. You can measure this in terms of the number of units that have been sold. If your goal is not measurable, you are never really going to know if your sales and marketing personnel have reached it.
- Achievable – The last thing you want to do is set your team up for failure. There is nothing more demotivating than this.
- Realistic – Ambition is a great trait but you have to draw the line somewhere. You are not going to increase your total number of sales by 50 per cent overnight.
- Time bound – Finally, we have deadlines! Something that we all hate but we all need. When does your sales team need to reach their targets by?
The integral role sales staff play
One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of businesses are making today is leaving their sales team out in the cold when it comes to marketing. It’s worth reading up on what is digital marketing and why it should be linked with sales.
If your sales and practice staff do not own the marketing campaign in question, they still need to be central to the development process. After all, your marketing campaign can only do so much – it is your sales staff that are going to be in charge of the most pivotal stage, i.e. turning someone from a prospective customer to a paying customer. This is why you need to give careful consideration to how the campaign is going to be activated, both online and offline, as well as the material used to engage, and what roles are going to be targeted. If your sales team does not have an input or understanding of any of these elements, this will segment the campaign to an extent whereby it is detrimental.
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