As we come into the New Year, it’s time to make some important changes to your sales and marketing strategies.

Here are twelve of them to get you started.

1. Increase your sales and marketing budget

There’s no such thing as standing still. If your profit increased this past year, then you need to increase the size of your sales and marketing budge proportionately. If it didn’t, then you definitely need to increase it. Your competitors aren’t going to wait around for you to catch up.

2. Review the characteristics of your customers.

Your customers define your business. Over time, this can change. In fact, you can depend on it.

You may find that the niche you originally intended to serve is not the one that you’re in. That’s quite common. You may also find that the needs of the customers you intended to serve have changed. That, too, is common. However, you’ll never know for sure what needs you should be serving unless you analyse the ones that you serve right now. So each year, you need to create at the very least a bulleted list of those things that define who your customers are. Then compare that with what you wrote down last year and identify the differences.

If this is the first year that you’ve done it, then make a list of the customers you had 12 months ago and jot down a brief summary of the work you did for them back then. Then you can do the same with the customers you are serving now and compare the two.

Of course, the more years of data like this that you have, the easier it will be to spot trends.

3. Evaluate your sales process

This is a comparison again.

How does the buying process for your customers differ between this year and this time last year? Be honest. You will be the loser if you aren’t.

Rate on a scale of one to nine the extent to which your customer acquisition process matches the process your customers go through before they buy. Ideally, they should fit hand-in-glove, but don’t be surprised if they don’t.

4. Solicit customer feedback

When was the last time you asked your customers how you could serve them better?

You also want to ask them what they would do if you were unable to provide the products and services that you do. Be careful how you do this. You don’t want to frighten them into thinking that that will happen. What you’re trying to discover is what it is that you do that they find particularly valuable. There’s a reason why they buy from you and not someone else who provides the same or similar products and services. You need to make it your mission to find out what that is so that you can capitalise on it. 

5. Review your content marketing strategy

This is not only about the quantity and quality of the content you create, but also the results that the metrics show that you’re getting. You ought to be able to find a correlation between your web presence and your sales. That’s because content marketing is marketing; and marketing should feed sales, otherwise it’s a waste of time and money to maintain it.

And in case you didn’t know it, the rule of thumb is that you should spend 20% of your time creating the content, and 80% promoting it. That means that you’ll need to evaluate how much time you spend on each. It could be that your ROI is low because you’re putting the time into the wrong thing.

6. Contact old customers and prospects, even if you think there’s little chance they’ll use you.

Businesses can learn a lot by analysing the strategies that Donald Trump used to win the US Presidential election. He recently pointed out that he fought a contest to win Electoral College votes; not the popular vote. To win the popular vote would have required a different strategy.

In the years, months, and days leading up to November 8^th, the Democrats figured that they had three swing states – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – all sewn up. But when the results came in, it was clear that they didn’t. Trump took all three.

The lesson is that you must do whatever is necessary to hold onto the customers you have, but also not be afraid to market to those that belong to your competitors. You’ll never get the order unless you ask for it.

7. Evaluate your customer service.

When you make a sale, your work is only just beginning. Even after you deliver your product or service, there is still much to do.

You already know that it costs more to get a customer than it does to keep him / her. One way, perhaps the best way, to hold onto your customers is to provide service that far exceeds anything that your competitors offer.

For example, are your products sold by Amazon.co.uk? Do you read the reviews? You need to read every review that comes out within minutes of its publication. Any hint that your customers aren’t happy, and you need to phone them to straighten it out. (Vendors apparently have access to this customer information.)

There are countless reviews on the Amazon website that detail the failure of many customer service departments.

Make sure that yours isn’t one of them.

8. Ask yourself better questions.

Here’s a great question. What would it take to get to the next level?

Now the “next level” can be anything. You have to decide what that is. It could be a 10% increase in sales revenue. It could be fifty new customers. It could be 100 new enquiries on your website.

It could be anything.

When you know what it is, then ask yourself what you would need to do to get you there.

If you don’t ask, then your brain will never tell you.

9.  Invest in the best sales and marketing training available in the world. Yes. It could be expensive; but what if it paid off? Would it be worth it?

Nothing ventured, and all that. Identify the best sales trainers in your industry and hire them to teach your sales people.

Then alter the systems in your company to support and reward the behavioural changes they need to make. If you don’t reinforce what they are supposed to do, then they’ll revert back to what’s comfortable.

10. Take your sales and marketing people on a retreat, and have them create a joint plan to work together, to communicate, and to identify and achieve joint-goals.

As long as your marketing arm is indifferent to your sales arm, they’ll be working at cross-purposes. You want them both to be aiming at the same thing simultaneously. So, get them together. Tell them to develop joint-goals and then to create a joint-action plan that will get them there.

Give them absolutely free rein to communicate across organisational silos so that there won’t be any unnecessary obstacles.

11. Attend at least one business conference. Your second one should be in a related, but not the same, industry.

Your goal is to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in your neck of the woods and then to discover new and better ways to excel in sales and marketing by seeing what others do elsewhere.

It’s remarkable how little information is cross-fed from one industry to another. Even academics have noticed this.

12. Set aside an internal sales and marketing training day each month.

To a certain extent, this exercise will depend on how many people you have in each function.

Have each person choose a book about sales or marketing, depending on which department they work in. The assignment is to read it and then to teach everyone else what the important points are and what they learned personally.

This will work best if you have at least a half dozen people in each department. That will give them six months to read a book. If you only have three, for example, they’ll have to read a book in three months. Not impossible, but a challenge for some.

If you only have one or two, then limit your “book reports” to four times per year. It’s essential that you keep up on what is going on. Books are one of the best ways.

You must also give people time at work to read. Don’t expect them to do this on their own time.

So, there you have it: Twelve things you can do in the New Year to improve your sales and marketing.

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