The Smartest & Coolest Midwest Marketing Agency Offers Tips to Grow Your Business

A Strategic Marketing Process to Increase Sales

Selling can be one of the hardest professions. The wrong skills, tools, and strategy can lead to too much wasted time and an empty pipeline.

At idc, we try to think of business first and make recommendations for developing sales skills—but where we live, and breath is strategy. Here is a handy checklist on how to beef up your strategic-marketing process to support new sales:

• Environmental / Situation Analysis
  • Do your homework on external influences from the market, competition, marketing channels, and economy to the political climate, social or cultural elements, and technology.
  • Study up on such internal influences as production costs, profit margins, talent and payroll, cash reserves, and availability to the age of your facility and equipment.
  • Focus on your target market(s). Is the company taking care of current customers, and is a process in place to grow your customer base? Is the firm positioned to attract new business with your current marketing resources and messaging?

• SWOT Analysis
  • Review and update your company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This entails internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. Your competition in the industry plays a big role in your sales strategy.

• Marketing Objectives
  • Determine your short-term and long-term objectives, including current and goal market share, product offering(s), research and development, profitability, and the sales volume required to get you there.

• Marketing Strategies
  • Review and validate your target market, followed by evaluating the marketing mix to reach this market, which entails a strong strategic position, messaging, and complete understanding of the target market’s communication channels.

• Marketing Plan
  • A great marketing plan contains budgets and time frames for all actionable communication programs you plan to implement within your marketing strategy.

• Sales Forecasting and Marketing ROI Reporting
  • Forecasting sales projections and devising a monthly or quarterly process for sales and marketing reporting will help your team work together toward their sales goal. This process will ensure that the marketing plan is actually supporting sales by providing leads or direct sales.

The key to any marketing program is to provide a process in which sales and marketing are in sync with the same goals as management, and they’re demonstrating similar ownership over the whole program. When that happens, as the idc team has seen on many occasions, the sky is the limit in marketing strategy and implementation that supports growth in sales.

Launched in 1972, idc-marketing is the most not only the oldest but also the hippest marketing firm in Lafayette, Indiana. We are a full-service agency that helps companies grow business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (B2C) market share.