We are roughly four months away from a new year. Reflecting back, did your organization struggle to hit its sales quotas? Were sales numbers just flat in 2019? Do you feel that you were missing a strategic piece, additional technology, and that your sales team needed extra motivation to meet aggressive sales goals?
The best way to finish this year strong is to have a strategy already set in place to make 2020 a year to remember, and if activated immediately, you will be able to see improvements within months. Here are four creative ways HubSpot certified growth marketing agencies have learned to help their clients hit their revenue goals and improve sales figures.
If you are keen on Greek mythology, you will know that Sisyphus was the king of Corinth who angered Zeus by cheating death twice and for his trickery. Ultimately, he got his punishment when the god dealt him the eternal punishment of forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only to roll back down to the bottom again, in the bowels of Hades.
It is easy for sales teams to get a Sisyphus complex; sales can be monotonous and repetitive, and when team members feel like they are trapped in the ennui of repetitiveness with no or little reward, they can feel like they are trapped in a virtual hell.
The best growth marketing agencies have a sales enablement specialist who understands the organization’s mission, who the sales team serves, and why customers benefit from the products and services being offered. They then align with internal leadership and the sales department to talk about the consequences of sales reps that don’t enable business deals to move forward, as missed opportunities are diagnosed, the approach is ameliorated, and sales teams are awakened with a new level of motivation and sense of urgency to meet and exceed their targets. Growth marketing agencies don’t just tear things down that aren’t working; they find the weaknesses in the foundation, devise a plan, and reinforce the instability by building up.
In order to increase sales, you need to get a good understanding of your customer’s buyer behavior, as well as an understanding of where they drop off in the funnel, and where they accelerate forward. Marketers will track traffic metrics on Google Analytics, but this data brings a level of opaqueness. The sales department has direct insight into where leads converted from, and how corresponding traffic plays into sales. This data allows them to see where they might be experiencing a drop in the inbound volume. When sales and marketing departments come together they can expand on deal-related data and look at such numbers to determine where sales and marketing can enhance engagement volume to help raise the number of met goals. When companies invest in growth marketing stacks, a sales enablement specialist will help leadership in both sales and marketing departments to ensure their team members have more opportunities to convert in the slower seasons. And CRMs like HubSpot will create that collaborative space for sharing data while making critical enhancements.
When you are able to shorten the journey between the time of impact where a buyer sees the potential value in your product, to the time of purchase, you will naturally see an increase in sales. The first step is to define your busy season. It could be at the pre-holiday season, back-to-school time, or fall. You likely already know when your busy time is, so there is value to go back, track conversions, identify where the most traffic converted from, and use these data points to drive a higher quantity, and quality, of leads all year long.
This ultimately means you need to shorten the decision-making stage in the buyer’s journey, and in order to do this, you need to feed target buyers with custom content better optimized to address their pain points and show how your products offer the best solutions to their needs. Savvy growth marketing agencies will use CRM technology like HubSpot to track the buyer’s journey and extract high-level information like their job titles, where they work, and even see the point of funnel entry, as well as when they converted to a sale, and even where they bounced out and moved into a lost opportunity category. This is powerful data you can use to attract more leads–something that Google Analytics and a solo SEO strategy simply can’t do unless it is part of an agile growth marketing stack. Therefore, growth marketing agencies use technology to increase sales in a customized strategic approach that can help organizations achieve multiple feats ranging from shortening the buyer’s journey, to implementing a proven marketing automation approach to increasing revenue gains.
A sales enablement specialist from a growth marketing agency will analyze your business, define KPIs, and commit to improving one over a predetermined period of time. Common KPIs to improve on include the deal size, number of closed deals, depth of lead touches, and shortening the sales cycle. When you are able to identify KPIs that have a direct impact on your bottom line, the next step is to work with your growth marketing agency to formulate a plan for improving each one, with a set timeline. When using HubSpot this data is housed and can be harvested for ongoing optimizations to continuously improve your KPIs thus improving your sales numbers and even streamlining your sales process. In order to improve state, you need to know them, and inbound marketing technology makes this possible, while simultaneously aligning your sales and marketing departments.
Some of the content covered in this article will be common-sense to some, and completely new to others. But regardless, it takes a tremendous amount of time, skill and creativity to know where and how to make the necessary adjustments to directly and positively impact sales numbers. If you think a growth marketing stack might be the missing piece to your success, download the WEBITMD guide on growth marketing stacks, see if the strategy aligns with your sales cycle and business needs. The next step will be to reach out; let us get to know all about your business model, products, and customers and together let’s find a growth-driven strategy best suited to enable higher sales figures.
