No company can survive without a proper sales and marketing management structure in place.
The marketing and sales team work together to grow and build massive customer patronage to a company.
Its important for us to also know that sales and marketing works hand in hand to build a business.
Hence, sales and marketing management has become one of the vital requirements to sustain continuous flow of income.
A good sales and marketing management structure will help you get more customers to your business.
Therefore, knowing the best sales and marketing management trick gives you an edge as an entrepreneur and a good chance to take over the target market.
I once worked in a factory where we had to sell off massive products from the warehouse to take in new productions and make money for the factory.
This is why entrepreneurs must pay close attention to their marketing and sales team for maximum output.
All business sector either small, medium or large scale businesses depend on the flying wings of a good marketing and sales team to generate profitable income.
What is sales management?
Sales management is the process of equipping a sales team, training and educating them on the best ways to generate lead, how to turn cold prospects to active customers and increase the level of sales in a company.
Sales management has to do with planning, targeting and strategies applied to close business deals.
It also involves training, seminars, meetings and forums to better promote the level of sales recorded in a particular company.
No company can survive without consistent sales and income, not even the big industry players like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla among others.
In the same vein, small businesses must know how to sell if they must remain valuable in the market.
When doing sales, the first people who will trust you will be strangers. Friends will be shielding against you, fair-weather friends will distance from you, family will look down upon you.
The day you finally succeed, paying the bill for every get-together, dinner, entertainment, you’ll realize everyone else is present except strangers.
Jack Ma, Chinese business magnate. He is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group, a multinational technology conglomerate
Hence having an effective sales management operation in place is a vital factor for profitable business growth, increased income and massive sales.
How to sell a product or service (step by step guide):
There are different sales techniques and strategies used today that teaches how to sell a product or service.
1. Identify the market problems (sales management tip):
The easiest way to sell a product to a customer is to sell solutions to them.
Find out the pressing needs of the target market and design a solution to it.
Hence, what would be the best way to solve the problems of your target market?
If you really want to make money them identify a problem and provide solution to it.
In short, solving problems remain the only approved way to earn cash and smile to the bank.
Hence, in the same vein, find the problems bothering your target audience, check the current solutions provided and improve on them.
Inside of every problem lies an opportunity
Robert Kiyosaki Bestselling author of rich-dad poor-dad
2. Carry out competitive analysis:
The market is highly competitive today. Every business has a competitor to deal with no matter the sizes of such business.
This is simply because you’re not the only one trying to offer the same product or service, just keep that in mind.
Small, medium and big businesses are always competing to win over a certain market. So how do you come in?
Check what the market is already doing about that product or services, what can you do to make a difference?
How will customers identify you out in the midst of the crowd? What will you introduce to outclass your competitors?
How to you intend to improve on the current customer service? All these require strategies.
Similarly, how will your target audience conceive your product and be willing to pick you in-spite of the current market competitions?
This is why you must get ready.
Ignore competitions and focus on your customers
Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and Multi-Billionaire E-Commerce Giant.
3. Know your customers (KYC):
Knowing your customer is very important if you’re going to sell any product or service.
Oh yes, your products are unique and authentic, they offer best service to the end users, but how do you intend to sell if you don’t know your target audience.
For example, if you set up a business to sell baby food then you must be targeting nursing mothers.
You can’t afford to target women in general because that would be an executive waste of your productive time.
Only a woman who is currently nursing a baby will be interested in your product, so being specific is important in sales.
Another example, if you want to sell building materials, it would be a wise decision to locate it in an environment where construction works are going on or is likely to go on soon.
4. Sort out potential buyers:
Oh yes, you might have known your customers, maybe you even have some list and contacts ranging to hundreds and thousands of leads.
The next thing to do is to identify those who are likely to buy now and those who will buy tomorrow or next week.
Some prospects might not buy today but they will surely patronize your business on a long run.
Therefore, I advise you schedule your activities on how to get the sales you need.
5. Present your benefits, nobody buys products or services, they buy benefits:
Tell people your product is amazing or the best in the market is a complete waste of time if it wouldn’t benefit them.
Almost every one buying an item today is buying because of what they will benefit from it.
What benefits are you bringing to the table? In short, always remember that nobody is buying a product or service, people buy benefits.
How will your product or service pass value to your clients?, you must answer these question.
Hence in crafting your sales pitch never make the mistake of trying to overrate your products.
Just focus on how it will benefit customers and they will buy, that’s a trick.
6. Don’t just offer, give irresistible offers (sales management):
How do you present your products and service? Does it look like you’re hungry for sales or you’re passionate about offering them solutions to their problems?
Your offers could affect their response in buying your products or services.
This could mean going extra length to serve satisfaction to your customers for their successful patronage.
I have seen an ice-cream vendor with a speaker asking people to buy 1 ice-cream and also get 1 free ice-cream.
You wouldn’t believe people were queuing up to buy ice-cream because of his irresistible offer.
Some people even took it further to buy 2 and get more free ice-cream, that’s the power of an irresistible offer.
To sum up, sales representatives who know how to make sweet offers would always sell no matter the market competition.
7. Expertise your niche (be a pro):
Know what your business is all about, expertise your niche, be well informed and knowledgeable about your business.
When you know the do’s and don’ts of your business, it becomes easy to close deals and generate massive sales.
Become data informed; know what works in your business and what doesn’t work.
This will help you dominate your competitors faster and generate quick sales.
The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself, the more you learn, the more you’ll earn.
Warren buffett – chairman and ceo of berkshire hathaway, multi-billionaire and considered to be world most successful investor.
8. Partner your sales team with the marketing team:
Sales and marketing works hand in hand. The marketing team will help in generating leads to your business.
Sales become very easy when the marketing team has done a good job promoting your brand.
The whole idea is to increase the income and revenue status of your business.
9. Invite prospect and existing customers for seminars (sales management trick) :
When you educate people about a product or service, it helps them build more credibility and trust towards you.
This will enable you prioritize your company and express the values of your products and services at the same time.
I have always said that most people buy from who they know; it takes a mutual relationship to build trust and credibility.
It’s normal to see people buying from a known and trusted brand.
Hence, when you organize seminars about your business, you tend to gain more popularity and increased sales.
10. Spark up a conversation but listen more:
Having some good level of conversation with your prospects would foster quality relationship between your business and customers.
Engage your potential customers in a conversation that could bring in sales but listen more and allow them express themselves.
This will give you a good chance to make improvements on areas they aren’t pleased with and adjust positions to enhance your sales.
Ensure to sell your company and product in the course of this conversation. As they say word of mouth marketing is very powerful.
Let the conversation be real, unique and engaging enough to give you the needed fact to promote your sales.
11. Have a FAQ Session:
Before a customer makes purchase for your product or services, they might want to know more details about your products and services.
Compile a list of frequently asked questions from your existing customers and answer all at your FAQ session to allow new customers get information’s without contacting you.
However, this doesn’t automatically mean customers will not reach out to you for their question.
It only helps to reduce the pressure and work load of attending to customers who have the same inquiries you earlier attended to.
Having a FAQ session also helps to win over difficult customers.
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12. Pricing and refund policy:
How much should you charge?, check the value your product or services bring to the market.
Check how much your competitors are charging to offer the class of products or services you render.
Next you can rate your products or services and have a list of pricing.
Ensure never to overcharge your clients except when you offer a higher value than expected.
Keep your prices moderate enough to allow customers pay at ease.
In the bid to charge moderately, never also undercharge; it’s a normal psychology that people devalue the worth of cheap things.
It will also be a good advantage if customers know you have a refund policy to return money for defective products and paid services not rendered.
13. Negotiating and bargaining power:
Build negotiation and bargaining power. How will you take prices for deals in a leveled way that doesn’t affect your customers neither does it affect you.
A good negotiator finds a balance line to profit both parties equally when closing a business deal.
Your sales team must be able to bargain prices with prospects that are likely to drop your prices.
Good bargaining and negotiating abilities are one of vital requirement for a well designed sales and marketing management structure.
14. Retain your customers using CRM (sales management):
What do i mean by CRM, it means customer’s relationship management, you can’t afford to sell once to a customer and lose them completely.
That will push you out of business; you have to do something to keep them coming back to you for more products and services.
Customer’s relationship management entails all you need to do to retain your existing customers and get new ones to patronize your business.
It could be giving out cool discounts, freebies, bonuses or any legitimate strategy that can help your customers stick to you.
Just do it because the more your customers, the more your sales and income.
15. Presentation (Sales message):
Let’s say you suddenly find yourself in an elevator with a potential client, how do you fully utilize the 1 minute elevator time to sell the benefits of your product.
How do you present your sales message?, don’t forget people hate sales pitch today.
Your products and services might be the best but if you can’t communicate the value out, you will end up losing a huge number of customers.
The ability to say the right words, use correct descriptions and pass your message at else within a period of time is needed for good sales to be made.
16. Initiate a call to action after every sales pitch (very important):
What is a call to action? It’s simply a prompting that motivates and encourage prospects to buy your product or services after consuming the benefits and values of your products or services.
Call to actions helps increase the income generated by a business sales team.
It boosts the revenue of a business and increases the level of growth a business experiences.
Hence, a good call to action helps to drive in more sales, which means more money to your business.
What is marketing management?
Marketing management is a process of managing the tools, strategies, techniques used in promoting and improving the brand awareness of a business with the aim of generating good sales.
The sweet part is that sales and marketing management team works hand in hand to promote the same goal of increasing income.
As a good marketing manager, when doing marketing, place your customers first, next your company, your team third and yourself last.
According to Wikipedia, Marketers can direct their product to other businesses (B2B marketing) or directly to consumers (B2C marketing).
Therefore, marketing management entails making decisions, planning, controlling, organizing and structuring the marketing aspect of a company.
How to market a product or service (step by step guide):
1. Do your market survey (marketing management):
For instance, what type of marketing strategies are your current competitors applying? what is currently working and what is not working? this is why you must study the market.
A good marketing team understands the market; they know what works and what doesn’t work.
They know where the prospects are and what they want.
How will the market react to pricing and what to do to make the business successful requires good study.
On the other hand, lack of proper market survey and analysis could be one of the major reasons entrepreneurs fail in business.
2. Consider online and offline branding:
It’s very difficult to sell a product or service to a prospect when you have zero brand awareness.
Offline and online branding could be a powerful marketing tool to get your target audience to buy from you.
People trust well known and popular brands compared to those they barely know about, it’s psychology.
3. Give valuable freebies:
There are many strategies to do marketing today, however no one can ignore the importance of freebies.
It brings back your customers and similarly keeps them glued to you
Hence, giving your prospect a taste of what your product or service looks like will help you win their attention and ultimately convert to sales.
Therefore, feel free to try this out and see how it works.
4. Register on Google my business:
Google my business is a great tool for your business to leverage on.
This helps businesses appear cheaply when searched by users on Google.
It also shows locations, the web address of registered business and time of operation adopted by such businesses.
5. Start a blog:
Blogging is one of the easiest, fastest and cheapest form of marketing today.
Secondly, starting and running a blog is less expensive to manage.
I consider it one of the best ways to do content marketing for a business.
Hence, you can also start a blog on your business niche, grow your audience and reach out to people by marketing your brand through your blog.
Consequently, blogging is interactive, this will enable you cheaply educate your prospect, create good relationship with them and answer their questions at your comment section.
6. Utilize free social media channels (marketing management):
Social media is still completely free. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, LinkedIn could be a big time marketing tool if you know how to use it.
Many successful brands today still utilize social media channels to market their products and services to their end users.
The interesting thing is that people love social media; hence they will find it easy to connect with your business.
7. Use email marketing (marketing management):
There is a big need to get the email address of your customers.
One good way to do this is to collect emails from prospects on the field when you go out to talk to customers or when you organize seminars and training.
Email marketing still works like crazy because some prospect might be too busy to follow up on your social media handle, but always go through their mails when they get a notification.
You can periodically send mails to prospects and customers about the benefits of your existing products and services, improvements made and the launch of new quality products and services.
Hence, we can say email marketing is one of the most effective sales and marketing management strategy today.
8. Host events (marketing management):
For instance, have you discovered that Red bull always host event that promote their brand.
Red bull is an energy drink company that knows how to send their sales message to customers.
They are always hosting energy consumption events and activities to show their product as an energy booster.
Red bull host major athletes games where energy is a major requirement.
That is to say, they anchor events that bring out the uniqueness of their brand.
It’s an energy drink company that knows how to use events to push their brands to the target market
9. Fliers, Posters and Card:
In addition to the 8 methods above, fliers could be a good way to market your business and build brand awareness.
Many business use postal boards today to market their business to their customer. It’s still effective and reliable and can win the minds of customer.
Some of these postal boards sometime display video graphics of what the product is all about.
Therefore, mount postal boards and share fliers because they go a long way in marketing your brand.
7 Vital importance of marketing:
Why can’t we just sell without marketing, why is marketing important?, let’s quickly list some importance of marketing to a business.
- Marketing increases the rate of sales on products and services.
- It helps customers take favorable decisions concerning a product or service.
- Marketing opens up a customer on what to expect from the purchase of a product or service.
- It boosts the brand awareness of a company.
- Marketing increases the seller’s confidence hence granting him an opportunity to share the benefits of his products and services.
- The stress in sales process is made easy with a good marketing system in place.
- It’s a way of educating potential customers about a product or service in a very quick and brief manner.
Am sure you’re getting value reading these sales and marketing management tricks, so here are other powerful articles for you.
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Life Changing Importance of Digital Marketing you Should Know.
8 Major Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Fail in Business.
How to Build a Great Customers Service in 2 Years.
16 Powerful Strategies to Boost Brand Awareness with little Money
Conclusion:
With a good sales and marketing management structure in place even a small business can take her share of the market cake.
The marketing team generates leads while the sales team closes the deal, this is a simple strategy that fosters high revenue to businesses today.
This marketing and sales technique is practiced by multi-million dollar companies in various business niches today.
The market competition is so high that businesses have to go extra mile in stepping up their brands to get the needed visibility to sell their products and services.
Do you run a business now?, if yes, then apply these sales and marketing management strategies.
However, here are 12 fantastic ways of getting money to start up a business.
Hope you got value from this article, hit me up at the comment section, did i also miss anything or you want to add something, let me know now.
Share this article; someone needs to see this to improve their business.
1 Comment
Thanks sir Noble, i intend to create a B2C article soon, as for the front size, i will say thanks for the observation, i will increase it.