Know-How Exchange : Other

With that budget you should hire an agency. It is not possible to truely answer this question on a forum like this.

Dear No Excuse

Your user-name suggests someone from a sales background, or maybe I’m just being nostalgic! I have to disagree with Harry, but only in the extent to which we can help. If you are able to provide enough information, we can make a good stab at setting out some frameworks which will move you forward.

Lets start with some of my specialities; CRM, forecasting, reporting and PR.

A sales force of 350 is large by today’s standards – are they employees of self employed agents? I ask this question because if they are currently the people who have the visibility of the actual end user customers, you will want to get as much information fed back from them as possible, without forcing an over-bureaucratic burden upon their shoulders. If they are employee’s you can achieve this by mandate, but if they are free agents, then unless they can see some benefits to their operations and revenue in their pockets, they will tell you to get stuffed.

You need to define the route to market. With no shops, how do the sales people get in contact with the potential customers? You have said that it is B2B, but not defined which type of B2B. The marketing assistance needed to supply say, a chain of automobile spare parts or accessory shops (Trade or retail) is very different to the strategy you need to supply to large companies with a fleet of vehicles. Which one is it?

You also need to look at the routes-to-purchase available to your customers. You are presumable but one supplier in a marketplace which is competitive. There must be USP’s to your products such as their quality or their price or their technology, but how do the sales people close a sale?

Only by identifying how the customers buy and how your sales people sell and close, can you start to work out how best to structure a marketing plan. Creating one without reference to these key points is just chucking money at a problem and hoping that some of it hits the target.

To really be of assistance, you need to give us an idea of the average value of a sale, the range of values of sales, the number of sales and the turnover which has been set (presumably) as a target. From these numbers and an understanding of how the buying and selling process works can you work backwards from your sales target to a series of marketing actions which will assist in the achievement of the target objective. Once you’ve done that, you can then start to look at where to spend your £1M.

With 350 people covering the ground (Presumably in defined geographic territories) your need for an effective CRM system is huge. You will need it both to pass on the fruits of marketing to sales people and to analyse who is doing what, where and when.

Without this feedback, you can’t forecast and if you can’t forecast, you can’t work out how to spend a marketing budget and ensure that the expenditure is worthwhile. You can talk to me directly about CRM and forecasting if you wish – the regular readers here know that I am a Maximizer Enterprise CRM business partner amongst others and that I work with SalesVision to enable quality reporting, forecasts and controls of sales activities. It’s also a good idea to ensure that everything which can be measured on the marketing front is measured, so that you can identify the successful campaigns. You can only do that if you can track a lead or an enquiry through to the eventual sales success or sales failure. My personal contact details can be accessed by clicking my name.

How do you generate leads at the moment? Do you advertise, carry out enquiry generating PR, send direct mail or what? That you can take orders by phone implies some form of visibility which presumably been built up over the years. Who places these orders – the people your sales force visit or their end-users? It’s not de-rigueur to have your price list and an order cart on a website, but as the cost of such an option has fallen so much in the last couple of years, it seems a pity to miss out on it. You will however have to be careful that the website doesn’t compete with the sales force or you will demotivate them.

How do you control and motivate the sales force? How do you know what they are getting up to and whether they are using the resources or leads you provide them with effectively? Do they feed back sales forecasts so they your factory knows what to make and purchasing knows what components to buy?

If you can answer these questions, and I’m sorry that there are rather a lot of them, I can give you some further guidance on how to bring together your marketing effort with your sales effort.

I’m making the assumption here that there is a sales target – is that the case? If it is, was it a figure which someone imposed upon the sales and marketing people or was it agreed. If it was agreed, then there should be a sales plan as well as a marketing plan. By breaking down the entire operation into manageable chunks you can pilot the ship to your destination. This method of target setting implies that the salespeople would have targets to meet. In order to meet those targets, they will need to be supported by enquiry or lead generation alongside their own efforts on territory and they will need to believe in the numbers they are being asked to achieve.

Somewhere there will be some numbers which can make this target happen. Sales people are simple souls at heart (I’m one and in sales mode I stick to KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid) so they need to know what they are going to be doing on a daily basis. How many sales visits should they attempt? How many appointments should they book? Can they call speculatively or cold to make a presentation? Who measures these numbers?

When marketing activity and sales activity align, there will be a greater likelihood of success that if each is operating in isolation. You need to know that you can spend your budget – and no, you don’t need an agency to do it for you- on activities which have measurable results and which can be shown to drive sales.

That brings me back to CRM. If you are not using a system at the moment or are using a poorly structured one your sales management activities and their relationship to marketing activities will be driven by a blizzard of paper and hours spent writing reports. You will also have very little information about your own customers, as sales information will reside with individual sales people, leaving you with either the bare info from the order book or a mound of reports and spreadsheets to make head or tail of.

If you can come back with further information, I will seek to be of what assistance I can. I understand that some of the figures may be commercially sensitive, so don’t get yourself into trouble, but in order to help, you need to drive towards having a dynamic (As in always changing!) marketing plan and a sales plan. Once these figures are available, you can then manage the sales and marketing effort by a mix of metrics, motivation and training.

If it is any solace, the majority of companies we work with (Thats about 450) didn’t know how to set a sales target, devise a marketing plan and ensure that all the activities needed to achieve them were carried out. It’s astonishing that about 75% of companies with a sale operation start off the week with a collective “Well, what shall I do today!” whilst marketing starts the week with “Lets try this and see what happens” One of our greatest successes freed up about 200 man-hours a month for selling in a sales team of 15, rather than reporting and added about 30% to turnover by alligning sales activities with marketing.

Hopefully we can ensure that you don’t end up in the first category but in the second.

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions and SalesVision

No Excuses,

I am guessing that repeat business (customer loyalty) is the core of your sales. You may want to consider email marketing as part of the mix. Do a free trial of a few permission-based email marketing firms and pick one.

I happen to work for the StreamSend Email Marketing service.

Another suggestion: create an online presence. Even if you don't sell direct to the user, you can generate online leads to your sales team effectively (and inexpensively). It can also help to create a better brand awareness, should you wish.