Five Easy Marketing Steps to Higher Sales

It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, driving new sales is the lifeblood of your company. The goal is really quite simple: build new sales that allow your company to grow so it can continue to invest in its people, products and services. Since we live in a world that transacts information within seconds and can do so easily across the globe, a strong marketing strategy is incredibly important to ensure your organization is headed in the right direction.

While developing the dimensions of a potent market strategy that will achieve the best business results, there are five easy steps that will add new sales and bottom-line profits to your company. These steps can be used to focus your marketing plans and provide for a measurable success.

Step #1: Target the right audience.

There are two major strategic mistakes companies often make while planning their strategic market plan:

A) Including target prospects that are too small to provide meaningful growth. It’s nice to come back from a tradeshow with 500 leads. Sounds like cause for bragging rights doesn’t it? It’s not if there are only 50 solid profitable leads among them and now you are going to have to weed through all 500 to find them!

B) Including short-term focused strategies. A lot like example A above, if the prospect will not be the type that will bring consistent, lasting results over a long period of time, then you need to keep prospecting. The up and down sales cycle of a company can often be pinpointed to too many short-term marketing strategies that feel good because leads are being produced, but actually end up hurting the company.

Step #2: Create the right type of leads.

Know the value of the type of lead you are looking for before you start your prospecting process. Meaningful programs that offer long-term value for prospects that buy into a one- or three-year site license vs. a “try this for free” promotion create very different results. There may be fewer prospects in the first instance, but those that do sign up will be with you for a much longer time and that will always out-produce short-term promotions.