How a solid sales and marketing process guarantees growth and exit success

Every growth-seeking business leader needs a robust sales and marketing process. Without one, your business won’t ever be able to run on its own two feet – forever set to be chasing new business and revenue, not generating it.

Sales and marketing need to work together autonomously to exponentially grow your business. A great process will generate leads for your sales team to win systematically. Revenue and cash will trickle in – you won’t need to go chasing for business when it becomes the biggest problem on your plate. Investors love it too: it demonstrates sustainable growth and scalability.

We’re not going to pretend it’s easy to implement this sort of process. It won’t be. It will come with pain, but as you will see, the effort is worth all of the gain.

A practical guide to building a solid sales and marketing process for your business

Here’s all you need to know about building a great sales and marketing process:

Define why your business is unique

You need a solid base to start building from. A value proposition is a mission-critical, written document that clearly says what sets you apart from your competitors. Most companies do not have one of these, and if they do it almost certainly won't be being used correctly.

A strong value proposition will outline exactly how you address the problems that your target customers are facing. Then, it will explain how your products and services solve them.

Without one, you’ll find your sales team at odds with one another. You’ll be baffled by your own sales presentations. You won’t have a focused marketing plan. And, crucially, your would-be customers (as well as investors) won’t know what you’re all about.

Develop a clear strategy

You need a strategy to articulate your goals and how you plan to achieve them.

Start with the very basics. State your business and commercial goals. Are you looking for big, ambitious revenue growth? Is there a new product or service you’ve developed that’s got you excited? Or a new market that you know you can enter?

From this, you can derive some marketing and sales goals. You can choose your target markets and target audience, then start to map out the channels you’ll use to reach them.

So now, you’ve got your car, and you know your destination. You now need to know a bit more detail about the route.

Understand your customer

This is where most strategies fall on their face. You need to understand your target audience.

Do not fall guilty of not choosing a target audience. You can’t pick an industry, or even handpick a selection of companies to choose – you need to choose real, actual people to target.

BMW, Audi > But who within those businesses do you want to talk to?

Detailed persona research will give you the insights you need into the needs, challenges and buying behaviour of your target customers. This will inform everything from the content marketing produces, to the slides in sales presentations.

Build a pipeline of leads

Forge marketing is a long-term sales and marketing strategy that attracts potential customers to you.

This involves creating valuable, rich, insightful content that appeals to your buyer personas. It’s a simple exchange: you give them insightful information and solve their problem, in turn, they trust and will engage you when they need the product you sell.

Plus, you’ll get visibility on who’s visiting your website, and engaging with your content and it’ll get the ball rolling on the qualification process we’ll talk about in the next section.

Set the qualifying standards

As you attract leads, it's important to qualify them to ensure they are a good fit for your business. Use specific criteria to evaluate whether they have a genuine need for your product or service and the budget to afford it. Only those that ‘qualify’ should be handed to your sales team.

Feed the pipeline

Sure, inbound marketing is long-term. It works best when you’re seeking growth over 3-5  years, not 2-3 months. But that doesn’t make it any less effective over the short term.

For quicker results, supplement your inbound efforts with paid marketing. This can include pay-per-click advertising, social media ads and retargeting campaigns to reach a bigger but still targeted audience.

Follow the money

Monitor the status of your leads as they move through the sales process. Pipeline reporting helps you understand where each lead is in their buyer's journey and what actions are needed to move them to the next stage.

Regular feedback from your sales team can provide valuable insights. This can help you refine your marketing strategies and address any recurring questions or objections from potential customers. It all helps you generate quick-to-close leads, faster.

Demonstrate the value

Get your sales team to assign a monetary value to your sales pipeline. This involves estimating the potential revenue each lead could generate. This information is useful for internal planning and is also valuable data for potential buyers or investors.

Sounds like too much to take on? Forge® does it all for you

Building and maintaining a robust sales and marketing process is complex and requires specialised skills. And that's where Forge comes in.

Forge specialises in building the growth engine that drives revenue growth and value in your business. Our approach is data-driven and revenue-focused. We bolt onto your sales team and give them the injection of leads they need, exactly how they need them.

Want in? Download our comprehensive guide to building a sales and marketing process that not only increases revenue but also prepares your business for a profitable exit.