Now it is all about going to market…
Last week’s article about planning should hopefully have inspired you to create or update your business plan. with your business plan and/or a marketing plan, the next step is to go to market with your product or service offering.
Most businesses have the following artifacts to back up marketing activities:
- Product Service brochures and flyers
- Case Studies
- Website
- Testimonials
- Industry Awards
- Short videos and demonstrations
With all of these in place, you are now ready to do some business development or BD for short. To do BD well, you need a focused campaign.
The campaign should support one of the marketing objectives in the business plan and have:
- A meaningful name
- An objective
- One or more goals
- Timescale
- A budget
As prospects respond to your teams phone calls, appointments, adverts, exhibition follow-ups and web inquiries, information needs to be captured and shared. The best way to do this is in a CRM system.
Some recommended CRM solutions include:
- Sales force
- SugarCRM
- Oncontact
- Sage ACT
- NetSuite
The time taken to record data in a CRM system is time well spent as it will be vital for follow-up calls and meetings, help you remember the sales stage that each prospect is at and what needs doing next to close the deal.
Most systems allow you to categorise leads, assign tasks to specific people and to see a dashboard view of your sales pipeline. My recommendation is to try a CRM system for a month trial. Another point is that only key staff will need a licence, so be frugal about how many actual user accounts you will need. Make sure that you have one place for storing contact details and keep data duplication to a minimum.
Maybe get in touch with us here at borwell to talk about your systems and how you could vastly improve them with bespoke secure software – https://borwell.com/#contact