Your Sales and Marketing Process

" This may be the most costly thought process of all time, and unfortunately a lot of companies live by it.

Are there inefficiencies in your Sales & Marketing processes today? These inefficiencies are costing your company money.

Because they are hidden costs that do not reveal themselves in your financial statements, they are continuing to do harm to your business. As "Lean" is really tied to removing costly inefficiencies, it applies to all aspects of business - your company's Sales & Marketing effort included.

If your company's sales and marketing program contains "non-value added" aspects, your potential for gaining additional market share is suffering because these activities are costing you money. You are either
passing these costs on to your customer by increasing your sell price, absorbing these costs and reducing your profitability, or suffering from doing a combination of both.

In any of these scenarios, Your company's ability to win incremental business is being compromised, but also your Current business is not as profitable as it could be.

Too many companies, whether they are manufacturers or distributors, are spending time and money repeating sales and marketing steps that are unnecessary to help them grow their sales profitably.

To determine if you need to implement "Lean" practices into your Sales & Marketing process, see if any of these 9 questions apply to your business.

1. Does your company have a "Sales Process" that is as effective as it could be, or is your sales team not advancing sales opportunities through the pipeline? 

 2. Does your company advertise in a way that reaches your desired customer and is producing a good ROI, or are you spending money on the hope that your desired customer will see it?

3. Does your company have an authoritative and educational website that is working for you as a sales tool, or is it just another website?

4. Does your company implement price increases efficiently and timely, or does the process take too long?

5. Does your company generate qualified sales leads and follow up on them to secure new business, or do you treat all leads equally?

6. Does your company appropriately segment your marketing initiatives, creating communications that "speak" directly to the desired customer or do you take the same approach to reach all potential customers?

7. Does your company have sales aid information that is organized and readily accessible for your sales team, or are they having to search in multiple places for that, including contacting your Customer Service?

8. Does your company effectively and consistently on-board new hire sales and marketing personnel, or is the approach inconsistent, resulting in a missed opportunity to instill your corporate strategy from the outset?

9. Does your company introduce products to the market timely and powerfully, or are you missing out on the great opportunity to draw attention to your brand?

All of the above are areas where inefficiencies can become common practice and hurt your top and bottom lines.

Your Sales People With Learning Process Outsourcing

Your sales staff is not delivering its best. And the only reason in sight for this under performance seems to be their lack of communication and selling skills.

In the past, you have tried hard to enhance their communication and selling skills, to make them more customer-oriented, but the results have been far from satisfying.

Have you ever tried learning process outsourcing?
Learning process outsourcing has been around for quite a long time, but still many organizations are yet to take advantage of this.

Put simply, learning process outsourcing involves outsourcing the learning requirements to the third party, which will be responsible for developing and delivering custom made trainings to the employees of its client and thus helping them to be more effective and efficient in whatever roles they have been assigned in the organization.

In outsourcing, it is the supplier (training company) who invests in infrastructure, technology, and provides top-quality service. And thus you do not have to worry about taking out time and resources for conducting all these programs.

Now let's talk about your sales staff. You know they lack some where, and the in-house trainings (which you conducted in the past) were not much of help; in such a scenario, you may like to consider speaking to a training specialist, which has been around for long, and has worked with several organizations in improving their sales performances.

Once the trainers gauge the training needs of your sales staff, they will conduct a series of training programmed to better their sales and communication skills, and thus help them close more deals. The trainers will ensure that the staff at all customer - touch points is able to answer customers' queries and make long lasting relationships with them.

Now think about it: your staff will be motivated, and will perform better; they will also get to know their shortcomings and the best ways to overcome them. They will better understand their jobs and their responsibilities to the organization. Isn't all this fabulous? You just need to partner with a training company that has extensive experience in learning process outsourcing; this is all you need to do. However, you should make sure that you talk to them in detail and let them know in advance as to why you are seeking their services. This will help the training company in offering you customized, smart training solutions.

Learning process outsourcing is a sure-shot way to improve the performance of your sales staff.