Your stale sales processes don’t need marketing facelifts applied-as-needed. It’s like putting aluminum siding on a brick house badly in need of tuck-pointing.
I am not telling you anything new. You hope your latest marketing communications strategy boosts new products and services sales.
Yet your business is built on selling products and services primarily to an existing marketplace. That’s good news. And bad news as well.
Stale sales processes get stale over time without anyone realizing it, most of all your sales people. It’s not their conscious intention to employ stale sales processes. They take pride in what they do.
It’s just that’s what’s happened over time. Here’s why.
Your company has positive cash flow. Your revenue stream is fairly constant, experiencing few dramatic peaks and troughs.
The bad news is that your current customers have pigeon-holed your company as the provider of only the specific types of custom goods and services that they’ve always ordered from you. That’s because your sales people have gotten used to repeat sales, rather than upselling and new business creation. That’s because your sales people aren’t meeting with success when selling to brand new customers.
With the majority of their customer base involved in same-old repeat and renewal business, your sales people are engaged in stale sales processes. Those stale sales processes become an entrenched habit over time.
Your new marketing campaign is designed for your current customers to see you with new eyes and give you more business. Yet they see you with the same old eyes and continue to do the same old business which has sustained your company thus far.
New marketing campaigns undertaken without concurrently taking a look at salesforce dissemination will fall short of anticipated results.
Sales people with entrenched stale sales processes aren’t inclined to change their ways with any sense of urgency. They will stick with what’s always worked for them. They will stick with their strategies, styles and methods which provide them with a solid income base. Can you blame them?
Are your new marketing campaigns are asking your team to do things differently?
If you are a company of one all the way to a small to mid-size company, chances are you are putting all of your strategic eggs in one marketing basket. There isn’t much wiggle room in that tack. You have few resources to spare if your strategy doesn’t pay off with marketplace traction and sales. Especially when your current sales team or your manufacturers reps utilize stale sales processes.
Before you move forward with marketing programs designed to solve pipeline and cash flow shortfalls, take a look at the impact of your shiny new strategy on your sales team’s habits. You may be compromising them in the long run.
They truly do not want to disappoint you. Help them out with the insight gained from this post.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a professional development coach and management consultant. She develops Playbooks for startups and small to mid-size companies experiencing unpredictable revenue streams. Then she brings these Playbooks to life.
Babette was named a Social Selling 2015 Top50 Influencer and a 2014 Top 50 Marketing & Sales Influencer. Babette’s blog won the 2014 Bronze Medal, Top Sales World. Babette’s book on horizontal business development and collaboration strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
Leave a Reply