Is your sales campaign optimal?
Revenue growth
Optimise your sales campaign with easy-to-follow steps
Do you know what the sales campaign is for your business? It seems that many people don’t know what it exactly means. Sales team often wonders why their sales activities such as roadshows and events didn’t produce much results, especially, when they spent a big budget on travel expenses. Why is this happening?
Focus and target audience for sales campaign
Sales campaign is not only planning a roadshow or business trip to see your prospects. It is a part of the viral presence building process. It is crucial to support sales campaign with effective communication and marketing strategies to create maximum buzz among your target audience. So what are the steps you need to take to create an effective sales campaign for optimal results?
Focus - What
What is the focus of your sales campaign? A new product launch or are you introducing new features for your existing product? Sales campaign needs be based on what you want to promote.
Who and Where
Who are you trying to target with your focus product? Where are they based? Having a clear idea who to target and where to find them is extremely important. For example, if the biggest target audience for your focus product is in the US and your current top priority is to build a revenue stream in the US quickly, there is obviously no point in planning a roadshow in other countries or regions with a big budget.
Purpose
Once you identified your focus product and its target audience, you also need to determine the “purpose” of your sales campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to raise your profile in the new market in general? Or are you having a specific revenue target from the new product? The “purpose” should dictate your communication and marketing strategies.
Robust communication and marketing strategies
I often notice that Startups and young FinTech companies lack robust communication and marketing strategies to maximise the effect of sales campaign. In order to convert your target prospects to qualified leads, it is important to incorporate the following tools to support your sales activity:
Press release for media engagement - if you are launching a new product or new features, make sure you let the media and journalists know before your sales campaign. Timely press release is very effective to create a virtual buzz - if you are lucky, certain media might pick up your press release and write an article in time for your sales campaign. It is worthwhile to consider hiring a good PR agency for this - you can then leverage their journalist and media network to blast your press release.
Social media posts for maximum awareness - if you are attending an event or conference, you can use social media posts to raise awareness prior to the events. This will create a viral effect via Word-of-Mouth Marketing; the attendees of the event/conference will see the posts, and they will start talking about your products among peers. However, it is important to identify relevant social media channels for your business. For example, if you are a coffee bean company in the new market, engaging your potential consumers via Facebook or Instagram is very effective, while Financial Services company can leverage LinkedIn as a primary channel to engage business customers pro-actively.
Email campaign - email blasts are also an effective way to raise awareness if you already built your own contact distribution list. For example, if you are planning a roadshow in a specific geographical area, target the relevant contacts in your network with an email campaign for awareness.
Contents development - to help your sales team to have meaningful conversations with prospects, you also need to consider contents development. What kind of insights can you share with your potential clients? In order for them to take you seriously they need to understand how they can benefit from your products or services. In particular, relevant use cases and thought leadership pieces are very effective to build a strong rapport with your target audience.
Marketing collaterals - do you have well-designed product cards and a professional looking sales deck for your sales campaign? In order for your sales team to engage target clients effectively, these marketing/sales collaterals should have attractive design with the clear value propositions of your products. With the recent digital transformation creating eye-catching collaterals became a lot easier. So, up your game and upgrade your collaterals.
I have witnessed many Startup companies improve prospect engagement with the above strategy. And they usually achieve very strong results in a short period of time. Before blaming your sales team for weak performance, I suggest you optimise sales campaign with the process described above. You may be surprised to see immediate results.
