How to Achieve Sales Goals and Improve Marketing

Optimizing your marketing and sales efforts has never been more important than right now.

Every dollar you spend on these two functions must pay off and translate to increased sales. It’s critical to the survival of your business and its success in the future. Consider these tactics to help optimize your sales and marketing efforts as you weather the current challenges:

Reconsider the people in your target market, and update your buyer personas

Life for many has changed more over the last few months than it possibly has over the past several years. It’s likely that the views of your customers and their economic realities have changed, as well. Take time to revisit your customer profiles and personas. Update them based on today’s realities. It’s an important way to understand who you’re actually marketing and selling to. Using old information could prove ineffective and could result in wasted effort.

Set realistic goals and understand your limits in achieving them

The marketing and sales goals you set months – or even weeks – ago may no longer be valid. Consider reassessing them based on today’s new and evolving realities, including the people in your client base, their changing mindsets, current financial realities and preferred ways of doing business, which now could be virtual rather than in person. Then, update your marketing and sales metrics to reflect what’s possible today. 

Once you do this, you’ll want to understand what could be preventing you from reaching what could be your somewhat more modest goals.

• Do you have people to develop responsive digital marketing campaigns?
• Are your employees equipped to close deals in a virtual world?
• Does your team have the tools, technology and equipment required to work effectively today?
• Are they doing too many things manually that could be automated, so they can use their time to do better, more valuable things?

Filling the gaps you identify will help the people on your team achieve their goals. These timely adjustments could be critical to the survival and success of your business.

Leverage technology that connects people, not keeps them apart

Marketers use tools that help them do their work. Sales reps have their own technology that helps them get their jobs done. The issue is that in many cases, the systems they each use don’t connect with each other. Rather than helping them do what they do better, their tech solutions drive them apart.

Consider updating your client relationship management (CRM), sales enablement (SE) and other sales and marketing systems so they communicate well with each other. Updating can help ensure that the two teams partner together to achieve common goals and aren’t working at cross purposes. This is particularly important during dynamic periods of change, such as what we’re living through right now.

Provide sales reps with training on marketing campaigns

What the sales team does should bring closure to marketing efforts. That’s why it’s important to provide your reps with current information about what your marketing team is up to and how the sales team is supposed to leverage that work. With this understanding, sales reps are better able to continue the story and close more deals. Make sure they’re aware of all initiatives, from social media and Google Ad campaigns to steps your business is taking to keep customers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Measure progress toward a single set of goals

The best way to know if your marketing and sales efforts are working is to constantly track progress toward a common set of performance and revenue targets. For the most part, it doesn’t work to have separate goals for each team. To be effective, it’s critical that they work together to achieve a common vision.

During better times, your business may have earned adequate revenue, even if sales and marketing were not fully aligned. Many companies don’t have that luxury anymore because people and businesses have less to spend and margins are extremely tight. Pay attention and consider making the necessary adjustments to better align the goals of your sales and marketing operations to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to support your business through these challenging times.