Clients often tell us that they are frustrated with their sales growth, but when we ask them about their marketing plan, they tell us they don’t really have one.
Of course, few of us are trained on sales and marketing, so here’s some starters that may help:
- Carry out a marketing audit gap analysis from which you can derive key action points.
- Perform a forcefield analysis – What helps your marketing and what hinders it?Then create actions to increase the impact of the positive forces and reduce the impact of negative ones.
- Your marketing plan should have a mix of proactive and passive activities; for example, networking is proactive, whilst web sites are often thought of as passive.
- Don’t bother bringing in new customers if you can’t look after your current ones: so, have a customer care policy.
- Which of the four growth strategies will work for you?
- Growth in your current market with your existing offering
- Offer your existing products/services to new markets
- Offer new products/services to your current market or
- New offerings in a new market- the high-risk approach!
- Consider where you are on a market option matrix, which looks at “differentiation” and “relative cost”; for example, if you have low market differentiation and relatively low costs, your competitive advantage may be on cost leadership. Alternatively, if you have high market differentiation and high relative costs, you would have to be in a niche market: so don’t try to market to everybody.
- Complete a competitor analysis matrix and work out how you can beat them.
- It’s often said that 50% of marketing works, but no-one knows which 50%….so measure and monitor your marketing activities and their outcomes.
- Let’s not forget the maths:
EG
If 30% of “suspects” turn into “prospects” and
if 10% of prospects turn into customers and
if average spend per customer = £5,000 and
if you want to increase sales by £250,000,
how many suspects do you need? - But remember: “turnover is vanity, profit is sanity whilst cash is king” – afterall, we are accountants.
(We have templates available to help you with many of these points: please just ask.)