Here are 16 building blocks for an impenetrable sales and marketing system. Do you have the skills, resources, budget, and plan ready to drive growth?
One of the biggest challenges businesses face is that finding and engaging potential customers is becoming increasingly technical and complex, and it’s all too easy to waste money on strategies that don’t get the desired results.
The best way to consistently meet your business growth objectives is to make sure you have a solid foundation from which to build. Things like a dated website, unorganized contact database, inadequate messaging, inefficient technology, and processes, or inability to measure results can prevent an organization from ever reaching its full potential. Here's what you need to build a strong foundation that will set you up for long-term success!
1. Analyze the CompetitionIdentify opportunities and risks and define your unique competitive advantage. |
2. Benchmark Current MetricsReview available reports. Create a starting point of reference about your current performance. |
3. Determine Goals and ObjectivesDefine what you’re trying to achieve and how you will know if you’ve reached your goals. |
4. Reporting StrategyOutline the ideal process for consistently reporting key performance metrics. |
5. Define Your Ideal Buyer Persona(s)Review current customers. Identify and list all the criteria that make someone an ideal profitable customer. |
6. Contact Management & List StrategyReview all contacts and contact management systems. Identify strategies to build target prospecting and email marketing lists. |
7. Sales ProcessReview the current sales process. Define the ideal plan for tracking contacts throughout the entire customer lifecycle (marketing and sales funnels and beyond). |
8. Inventory Existing Sales and Marketing AssetsOrganize, inventory, and review all sales and marketing assets, including sales emails, presentations, blog articles, content offers, brochures, brand elements, and more. Prioritize content to keep, update, or dump. |
9. Keyword / SEO StrategyResearch and list the core keywords for the industry and company. Identify strategies to improve on-page and off-page SEO. |
10. Content StrategyIdentify the average buyer’s key considerations as they move through the sales cycle and outline a blogging and content offer publishing calendar. |
11. Website StrategyEvaluate the website and make a list of top priorities to improve the functionality, user experience, and visit-to-lead conversion rate. |
12. Email Marketing StrategyEvaluate the current email marketing strategy and templates. Outline the types of email to send, how frequently, and to whom. |
13. Social Media StrategyReview and evaluate all social profiles. Outline a social publishing, monitoring, and engagement plan. |
14. Sales and Marketing Technology PlanDefine the required functionality to accomplish your goals and objectives, and evaluate which platforms or integrations best suits your needs. |
15. Other InitiativesEvaluate and review all other active sales and marketing strategies (trade shows, paid advertising, co-marketing, etc.). |
16. Assign Roles & ResponsibilitiesDefine the internal and external resources needed to execute the plan, and set up a project management process to manage all of the tasks and who owns them. |
If you’re thinking, “That’s a lot of stuff!” – it is. After your evaluation, you’ll probably come up with a very long list of things you should do to strengthen your position. It’s important to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, so take a deep breath and prioritize the list according to what tactics and strategies will have the biggest impact on achieving your goals.
Some of these elements can get pretty technical, so you’ll want to make sure that whoever does the plan has experience in these areas. If you’d like to spend more time making well-informed strategic decisions about how to grow your business and less time wrestling with data, reports, and planning, learn more about how an independent marketing audit and action plan can help.
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