Righttrack Whispers: Sales & Marketing Effectiveness

by Rennie Gould

Having just completed an assignment to implement a marketing academy in the Gulf, I have been reflecting on the implications of training on sales & marketing effectiveness.

Customer Understanding

Whether we are talking sales training or marketing development, it is clear that a good understanding of the customer is the most important starting point for any training programme in these areas.

For marketing, accurate positioning and targeting is not possible without an in-depth understanding of customers and their aggregation into like groupings or segments. Similarly, marketing communications, specifically advertising & promotion, will lack precision unless we have a clear understanding of customers and of the messages they want to hear.

For sales, particularly with large scale B2B sales, the creation and communication of powerful and persuasive value propositions is not possible without a detailed knowledge of how customers make buying decisions, together with knowledge of who is involved in such decisions.

Therefore, bringing the voice of the customer into the organisation has equal importance for both sales & marketing and is a pre-requisite for training in these areas. This is why we make it a point at Righttrack to introduce our training delegates to the tools and techniques of marketing research and to encourage delegates to test them out on real customers.

Sales & Marketing Integration

In most organisations, sales and marketing are separate functions. Marketing is responsible for dreaming up the next new product, whereas sales are responsible for selling it.

Unfortunately, a lack of understanding between the two functions can lead to a wasted market opportunity.

In our training, we like to bring delegates from both functions together. Marketing can benefit from the sales perspective, particularly what sales people need in order to create convincing arguments for customers. Sales, on the other hand, can benefit from the marketing perspective, particularly what marketing are trying to do to grow the brand and to create customer lifetime value.

Transfer of Learning to Marketing Activities

However, the most important lesson from sales and marketing training is the need to transfer the learning to actual sales and marketing activities and behaviour.
In our experience, we find there is no substitute for basing the learning around the client’s own competitive situation and for involving managers in both the training and its follow-up.

In this way we make the training both relevant and effective but most importantly very cost effective from a business efficiency and business generation point of view.