Coping With Economic Downturn With Win Win Marketing And Sales Strategy

For some time,

The first is to redefine the priorities of advertising tools.

New communications tools, such as the Internet, social networking and mobile devices, are shaping up and producing positive results.

At the same time, traditional media such as television have changed, at least becoming more expensive.

Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of achieving cost savings, most marketing programs try to combine traditional and new tools, which usually account for 10% to 15% of expenditure.

Redefining priorities requires marketers to have a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of different forms of advertising than at present.

Marketers believe that the scope and cost of advertising tools represent their effectiveness, thus ignoring the quality of the advertising tool itself, that is, its ability to influence customers.

Quality is the easiest to measure in direct business. It can accurately determine the return on investment generated by sending out product catalogues and e-mail.

However, for more difficult tools such as television, product placement marketing and sponsorship activities, there are ways to estimate their quality and prioritize accordingly.

By combining various sources of information, enterprises can maximize the accuracy of their quality assessment through customer quantitative surveys, discussion groups and seminars after the event.

Some consumer goods companies that have recently conducted such seminars have found that the consensus formed is in line with more in-depth quantitative studies.

No matter how the enterprise forms its quality assessment, its real role comes from the analysis of the analysis and the data of the scope and cost of the advertising tools.

This combination of scope, cost and quality helps marketers to compare the impact of different tools one by one, which is the key to effective prioritization.

There is no consistent pattern to show whether traditional tools or new tools perform better in terms of scope, cost and quality.

Therefore, marketers must make an objective comparison so that they can not hesitate to eliminate invalid tools and confidently support highly influential tools.

Second, we must redefine the priorities of sales functions.

In order to increase profits, enterprises usually try to reduce daily sales expenses in difficult times, while concentrating resources on front-line sales teams.

However, the support systems used by the current sales team are different from those in the past. These support are so important that they can not be separated from each other: they play a strategic role in the sales process, which is crucial to the provision of services to the most profitable customers and the pformation of potential customers into new customers.

If executives cut this support function in a wide range of cost reduction actions, they will face a serious risk of damaging the effectiveness of the sales force.

If the person in charge of sales has to cut the cost by 10%.

Cutting product experts, industry sales managers and telemarketing support may lead to fewer sales leads and lower sales success rates, and sales will be much worse than the same number of sales or customer managers.

Similarly, if the price reduction and competitor analysis teams can lead to poor pricing decisions, they will reduce profit levels or waste time on sales leads with no returns.

After analyzing the success rate and profit margin of the new contract, the sales person confirms that retaining product experts and pricing experts is crucial to maintaining profitability.

That is to say, enterprises do not have to cut their daily expenses one by one, and they can design their sales plans in a variety of ways while maintaining their performance.

Evaluating the current sales coverage mode helps companies decide which sales and sales support modes are more effective for what types of customers and sales conditions, and then rebalance resources as needed.

In practice, this approach may require online processing of new orders from repeat customers, completion of the basic sales and customer management tasks by telemarketing representatives, and the use of a larger response team to handle major ordering agreement requests.

Another important step is to analyze the winning and losing ratio in difficult customer negotiations, and consider deciding which sales support teams are most effective and which teams can make the least contribution and thus reduce them.

Streamlining the after sales process and determining the appropriate level of customer support can also reduce costs.

One of the keys to all these moves is to understand the expectations of customers and understand the importance of after-sale support to the overall experience of customers.

This sophisticated approach can help sales and marketing executives more confidently discover areas of cost saving and protect employees and programs that make direct contributions to profitability.

In short, companies that follow the old rules of dealing with recession may pursue chasing market and market segments that are less attractive in the current downturn, and invest too much resources in traditional marketing tools and front-line salesmen.

In order to avoid these costly mistakes, marketing and sales executives must dynamically reassess the priorities of their regions, customers, advertising and sales teams, always pay attention to the changing economic situation during this downturn, and win win marketing and sales strategies to cope with the economic downturn.