4 Tips for Sales and Marketing Success in Start-ups and SMEs

Tom Parker, Founder of The Sales Architect and a HomeWork Business Club facilitator

As a start-up business, it’s important to focus on activities that can help establish or optimise your sales and marketing efforts. Here are 4 core activities that you can focus on, along with some online resources to help you get started on your research and learning journey.

1. Develop a targeted sales strategy

Identify your target audience and create a sales strategy that focuses on addressing their needs and pain points. This will help you connect with the right type of customers and avoid those that aren’t a good fit for your product or service.

• Define your buyer persona: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data and research. It helps you focus your time on qualified prospects, guiding product development, and aligning sales and marketing strategies.

• Identify your unique selling proposition (USP): Your USP is what sets you apart from your competitors. It’s the reason why customers should choose your product or service over others.

• Create a sales process: A sales process is a series of steps that your sales team follows to move a prospect from a lead to a customer. It helps you move deals through the buying journey faster (aka. ‘velocity’ ), and ultimately close more good-fit customers.

2. Implement a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

Create a marketing strategy that combines content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and other tactics (aka. ‘Channels’) to reach your target audience and generate leads. Starting with one channel, testing and iterating, then adding more channels as you see what works, is always better than going too broad too fast.

• Choose the right marketing channels: There are many marketing channels to choose from, including social media, email, cold calling, advertising, PR, and many more. Choose the channels that your target audience uses most frequently.
  
• Create a content calendar: A content calendar helps you plan and organise your content marketing efforts. It ensures that you’re publishing content consistently and that your content is aligned with your overall marketing strategy.

• Create compelling content in the right content format: There are many content formats to choose from, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, and more. Choose the format that your target audience prefers and that aligns with your overall marketing strategy. 

3. Align Sales and Marketing Efforts

Ensure that your sales and marketing teams are working together to target the right customer base, create more conversions, and drive more sales. Sales and marketing teams that work in siloes will often be driving at different targets and generating leads that are not a good potential fit for your product.

• Use a CRM: A CRM (customer relationship management) system helps you manage your customer data and sales pipeline. It ensures that your sales and marketing teams are working together and that you’re not missing any opportunities.
  
• Establish the marketing -> sales handover point: Get on the same page about when a contact crosses the line between a marketing prospect and a sales lead. Having good qualification criteria in place will help ensure objectivity in your classification.

• Set up regular meetings: Regular meetings between your sales and marketing teams can help ensure that everyone is on the same page and that you’re working towards the same goals. The correct structure for the meeting is essential (check out the resource below).

4. Track and Analyse Your Results

• Set up analytics: Use analytics tools to track your sales and marketing efforts and analyze the results. This will help you identify what’s working and what’s not, so you can make data-driven decisions. Most CRM systems have built-in analytics tools that are suitable out-the-box, but specific tools for an additional layer are available.

• Define your key performance indicators (KPIs): KPIs are metrics that help you measure the success of your sales and marketing efforts. Choose KPIs that are aligned with your overall business goals and make sure they are SMART.

• Use A/B testing: A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or marketing campaign to see which one performs better. Use the concept of A/B testing in all your commercial activities to improve revenue results over time.

By considering these key points for each of the 4 core activities, you can establish or optimise your sales and marketing efforts, even with a small team and budget. Use the resources provided in the previous answer to learn more about each activity and get started today! 

All HomeWork Business Club members can contact Tom Parker for a free 30-min consultation session in which we can establish an optimal route to solving any of your revenue/commercial problem statements.

Please contact the HomeWork Team to find out more.