Improve your Sales Efficiency and Sales Effectiveness through smarter marketing

We know as a Founder/CEO one of the things that keeps you awake at night the most is how to close more sales and grow your revenues. As you might be aware, it usually comes down to three key factors:

• Retain the profitable customers you have
• Sell more to your existing base
• Attract and acquire new customers

Simplify and Amplify Sales

Every company needs to generate more income from sales than it invests trying to make those sales.  So improving sales efficiency and effectiveness is critical, especially in the current environment, and it can be driven in a number of ways.

At its most basic level you could consider:

• Selling at a higher margin to current customers – Challenging in the current market conditions
• Reducing your cost of sales – Reducing the size of your sales team - Risky and now isn’t the time to scale back your sales efforts
• Improving the effectiveness of your marketing efforts – Less risk -> greater payback at speed

Given the objective is speed with less risk -  improving your marketing efforts is the obvious best option.

Aligning Sales & Marketing

The goals of marketing and sales are ultimately to grow business and generate revenue, so they need to be joined at the hip, and work together with shared goals.

This means enabling a shared playbook that gives them both visibility of what the other is working on and to leverage insights and knowledge from both sides. At any time, success means you need marketing and sales to have GTM alignment AND executional alignment

Getting it right will enable:

• Laser focused marketing - Understanding customer pain points and needs that support high intent sales drivers enables you to better segment high value prospects and target the most important ones. Clearly this lends itself to a carefully targeted  Account Based Marketing (ABM) programme. 
• Impact based analysis - Gives you the ability to better assess, define and refine what’s working and what’s not working.  You can optimise the use of automation tools and AI to unpack insights and data analysis - but ensure you overlay your findings with context to the human connection.  Sometimes buying happens outside of our horizons, but that doesn't mean nothing is happening. 
• More meaningful communication – Getting the content and tone of voice aligned to your customers - will maximise your chances of success.  Use sales conversations to uncover customer insights to see why they have engaged with you, what they say and how they articulate their need.  Use this as a basis to develop/refine your positioning so that you stand out from the competition and improve your ability to engage with new customers. 

• Better understanding of buyer patterns and triggers – What’s the typical process a potential buyer will go through?  How long will it take, what jobs are they trying to do, who do they involve and what was the catalyst (trigger) for them to consider making a move or finding a solution?.  You need to ensure that you are top of mind a at the start of the buyer journey.  One thing’s for sure, if you don’t make it on to a shortlist at the time of need, you won’t get the sale. 

All of the above, if done well, will lead to improved Sales Efficiency (ensure you are selling your solution in the most efficient way possible) - and Sales Effectiveness (making sure you're selling the right solution to the right yielding customer at the right time).

It’s easy to talk about a high-level concept like sales efficiency. However, as always, the value is in thinking it through and doing the work right.

Resources to get your started
You can download our Setting your Sales Team up for Success guide designed to help you implement enablement strategies that equip your Sales team with the tools and resources to engage prospects and drive conversions effectively.   

We have a full list of freely available resources here Tactical 20, where you’ll quick tactical plays to up your marketing, and a simple Marketing Health Check to make sure you’re on the right track.  

Looking ahead
As we look towards wrapping up the year and unwrapping the new, it’s the perfect time to rethink your marketing and sales strategy to hit the ground running in 2025. If you, or someone you know, needs support navigating sales challenges, get in touch anytime, we're here to help Kiwi Tech businesses grow.