Sales and marketing should work together
Sales and marketing often get lumped together but are very different activities. Ensuring that your marketing creates enquiries that you can sell to profitably is central to your sales success. Marketing campaigns that bring in leads that you cannot sell to effectively are expensive, time consuming and damaging to your brand. Worse still are “brand awareness campaigns”, that’s when your ego gets boosted but your bank balance doesn’t!

The starting point is a well-planned Sales and Marketing Strategy
What’s your plan to increase sales and what resources will you need to do this? What’s your Unique Selling Point that differentiates you from your competitors? What’s your target market? (If you answered “anyone” try again!) Which are your most profitable customers and who loses you money? How will you reach potential customers who are motivated to buy from you?

Converting warm leads into money in the bank
It’s sometimes a bit of a dirty word these days but SALES is what is important. Marketing maybe the glamorous bit that gets the attention but converting those leads into paying customers is what puts food on the table. So making sure your sales team is effective is essential to your profits!

How to Successfully Run a Sales Team
Generating profitable sales means working out the best sales processes, agreeing sales targets and incentives, then setting in place procedures to monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Sales staff can then be developed with training, coaching and mentoring to increase their sales performance. When targets are not being achieved, the monitoring of KPI will enable action to be taken to address issues based on facts, not guesswork.

Great Delivery turns Customers into a Referral Network
And just as important is to follow up sales with product or service delivery. Poor internal and external communication can ruin profitable, long-term relationships before they begin. You’ve worked hard to get the customer, so make sure you keep them! Not only that, make them such a raving fan of your business that they introduce more customers to you.

Happy Sales and Marketing, and if you need any assistence, don’t hesitate to contact Nican.

About The Author:  Nigel Wilkinson is Managing Director at Nican. In addition to his business interests, Nigel is married to Yoga Dance teacher Michelle, the father of teenage twins, Chairman of Exmouth Chamber of Commerce, an avid Networker, a Social Media commentator, a keen golfer and football supporter.

In the early, exciting stages of starting and running a business it’s often a case of head down and just doing stuff, marketing, selling, manufacturing, accounting etc. and you pretty much know where the business is because you are the one doing everything.

Monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPI) seems pointless at this stage.  However, often as the business grows this lack of information continues and management rely on “gut feeling” or a sense that “I started my business and I know how it works” to make decisions.

But perception and reality can be deceiving.  What can seem rewarding and profitable can, when subjected to analysis, prove an expensive waste of time.  For example a client who is fun to work with, who calls you regularly for advice and pleasant chats may appear to be your best client.  When you track the hours spent against money received, often with late payments, your “best client” can rapidly drop to the bottom of the list!

The best time to develop systems for tracking the KPI is right at the very beginning, start by recognising what is important in your business?  Typical numbers on the sales and marketing side include Cost Per Lead, Cost per Sale, number of 1^st and 2^nd appointments, number of sales, value of sales, average sales value and Lifetime Value of a Client.  Depending on your business you should be tracking some, all or variations on this theme on a regular basis. 

I would even go so far as to argue that the more often and the more accurately you track these KPI the more successful your sales and marketing will be.  For example, I used to take a stand at a high profile local exhibition.  Each year we returned with a big pile of contacts, many who had expressed interest in our services.  We always ended up making sales.  Fantastic! 

Of course we tracked the number of leads each year, monitored the source of appointments and always logged where sales came from. The exhibition was a huge success each year, generating leads, sales activity and new clients.

After a few years I did a closer examination of the cost of the stand, including the cost of manning the stand, the leads we collected and the number of sales we achieved.  Then we looked at the Lifetime Value of the Clients we had obtained.  This is where the reality and perception collided. 

The Cost Per Lead and the Cost of Sale were higher than other marketing methods and the Lifetime Value of the Client from that particular exhibition was much lower than average.  Not a bit lower, much lower.  With the odd exception the quality was very poor.   Suffice to say we have not exhibited there since.

So track all your KPI as soon as you start your business and track it in detail.  You may not spot trends immediately but the fact you have that information means that eventually patterns will arise and decisions can be made on hard empirical evidence.

I have focused on sales and marketing in this article but does not mean it is not important to track KPI in other areas of the business, all areas should be under the microscope all the time.  As the business grows this becomes the single most important factor in running a successful enterprise.  So spend time to work out what your KPI are, track them religiously and watch your profits grow.

About The Author:  Nigel Wilkinson is Managing Director at Nican. In addition to his business interests, Nigel is married to Yoga Dance teacher Michelle, the father of teenage twins, Chairman of Exmouth Chamber of Commerce, an avid Networker, a Social Media commentator, a keen golfer and football supporter.

Every business is unique and has its own characteristics but there are certain elements that are consistent across all companies, regardless of industry or sector.  This is especially true as the business grows and the business owner or manager ceases to be a do-er in the day to day nuts and bolts operation of the business and moves into running the business.

I’ve grown my business over the past ten years from just me working in a back bedroom to a team of ten people in a successful business and have clearly done many things right.

However in the past ten years I have made a series of mistakes, mis-judgements and bad decisions.  Whilst it would be great to look back and say every decision I made was correct, I am not ashamed of the mistakes nor have a single regret.  I read recently that David Beckham has less than a 6% success ration from free kicks but is still regarded as one of the best free-kick exponents in the world.

By putting yourself on the line and trying to achieve something you are likely to make mistakes and fail. The important point is that you learn from the mistakes, dust yourself off and try again.  Eventually, with practice, and improved decision making you will get the desired result, be it a successful business or an amazingly goal.

If you attempt fifty business ideas to make yourself a success but forty-nine fail and only one succeeds it doesn’t matter.  At the end of the day you are a success! That said, much better that attempt number one, two or three succeeds.

So if I had a time machine and could go back to January 2000 when I started my own business, what would I want to tell the enthusiastic younger me working in the spare bedroom? What are the most important things to know that can significantly improve the chances of running a successful business?

 Over the coming weeks and months I will be blogging the key lessons I have learnt over ten years of running an SME.  I will be covering areas such as sales, marketing, process mapping, monitoring key performance indicators, mentoring, developing positive mental attitude, personal development, recruiting, employing, intellectual property and much more.

I hope these articles will prove useful to you as you grow your business and if they help you avoid a pitfall along the way I would just ask one favour.  If you ever invent a time machine and happen to be in Devon in the year 2000, please pass these lessons onto me!

Nigel Wilkinson is the MD of Nican Consultancy Ltd and founder of WNW Design