Blogs on Marketing & Sales Management

1. That’s Where All the Customers Are! Despite the industry to which a business belongs, its customers are likely on social media. With almost 60% of the world’s population using social media, it has become imperative for businesses to use this medium to reach out to their target audience. Building a brand on social media will help your potential customers find your business easily. People are using social media pages to find and research brands and products, read reviews, post queries, give feedback, and help them with their buying decisions. For example, if a customer is looking for a poolside restaurant offering a candlelight dinner, they may search for it on Instagram or Facebook. Not having a Facebook and Instagram page will make the restaurant lose this customer’s business. Ideally, businesses should regularly post offers, information about new products and engaging messages that will help them gain new customers. 2. Moving with the Times The world around us is changing and so should we. History has shown us how those who didn’t adapt to changing technology and trends lost momentous opportunities and were thrown out of the game in some cases. If this dynamic environment has taught us something, it is adapting to the latest technology and keeping oneself abreast of changing times. While traditional media is in no way obsolete, the technological age that we are living in demands the use of social media marketing. With cell phones or handheld computers in the hands of most people, social media is just a click away. Social media has over 4 billion users, which is expected to grow to 6 billion by 2027. This makes it a formidable tool to be used by marketers. 3. Engagement, Engagement, Engagement! Customers are the key to any business’ survival and growth. Any business looking to generate brand awareness, brand loyalty, and customer satisfaction needs to be able to engage its customers. Customer engagement means delivering personal experiences to your customers by cultivating relationships with them through active communication instead of single, one-off, or fleeting transactions. In this modern era, where technology is at our fingertips, engaging with customers has never been easier. Traditional media doesn’t provide much scope for customer engagement. Social media, on the other hand, is all about engagement. Social media marketing strategies must be designed keeping this in mind and businesses must develop social media marketing content that will attract their customers’ interest and help build a long relationship with them through continued communication. Engagement is one of the most important social media metrics used to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns. Therefore, brands build social communities to increase customer engagement, which if done correctly, can result in increased brand awareness and loyalty. 4. Social Media Helps Target Ideal Customers Using social media advertising, businesses can target their advertising campaigns towards users who are most likely to buy their products. Businesses need to define their target customers and understand their behavior. Social media platforms provide valuable data on customers looking to buy products, e.g. their age, gender, location, web page history, transactional data, and much more. This can be used by businesses to optimize their advertising, make it more effective, and target the ideal customers. This translates into increased website traffic, brand recognition, and conversions. The cookies from customers’ browsers are also used to gain insights into their search history, likes, dislikes, and buying habits. With so much data and information, social media is, indeed, a valuable tool that businesses cannot afford to ignore if they want to cash in on its benefits. 5. It is Cost-Effective Social media marketing helps cut costs compared to other media like print and television. Running advertising campaigns on TV, newspapers, radio, hoardings, and other traditional media incurs huge advertising costs. Social media, on the other hand, is relatively cost-effective. Just by investing a few hours per week on social media, businesses can yield great results. The CPM (Cost Per Thousand) on social media is almost 3 times less than traditional media, making it an extremely cost-effective medium. It is especially beneficial for small businesses having limited advertising budgets and manpower. Even if a business decides to use social media marketing extensively as an important part of its media mix and social media marketing strategy, it still remains significantly cost-effective. So even with small budgets and fewer resources, businesses can run social media advertising campaigns on Facebook, X, Instagram (Read Instagram for Small Businesses: A Short Guide to Leveraging Instagram), YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other social media platforms, have the desired impact on their target audience, and increase their inbound webpage traffic, and convert new leads. Social Media Marketing Essentials You Always Wanted To Know is an all-encompassing guide to get your social media marketing fundamentals in line. Also read: How to Create a Marketing Plan Ethics in Market Research 4 Relationship Marketing Strategies Successfully Used by Big Brands      

Motivating the sales team by offering monetary and non-monetary incentives has been an established practice in salesforce management. Non-monetary incentives can include the following ways to push team members up to the next level of performance and job fulfillment, and in the process, make them contribute their best to the organization’s growth journey. Here are some ways to motivate your sales team:   1. Continuing education and training In today’s ever-evolving market place it is essential that an employee is well-versed with the best practices being followed in the domain of sales management. Even the most experienced salespersons can face difficulties in meeting the changing benchmarks of performance without adding up to their knowledge and skills. This is where continuing education can help bridge the gap. There are several ways to encourage the sales team members to pursue continuing education to enhance their skill set. Online programs and courses from leading educational institutes or online Edu-portals Offline training programs by a well-known coach or a corporate trainer Sending them for on-campus part-time executive programs in sales management at leading universities Giving them a sabbatical to pursue full-time, continuing education An organization should ideally sponsor the above initiatives in order to motivate the employees and provide them an incentive for taking up these initiatives. Organizations which encourage such human resource policies are more likely to stay competitive in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) marketplace. In most cases, salespersons are armed with knowledge about the basic essentials of the sales function. But organizations should conduct training programs that build a layer onto the foundation of the fundamental learnings of sales management. 2. Who fits where? All sales reps are not equal. As a sales manager, you should be able to identify their strengths, weaknesses, ambitions, and preferences, and accordingly, assign them their roles and responsibilities. This will help in achieving optimum results. For instance, one may like to build rapport with small and medium client accounts and another one with larger customer accounts. Are they a part of a set of seasoned executives or are they still learning the basics? Some may have in-depth knowledge of a focused market or industry vertical. Some may be well networked within the peer community. Some may be well versed with sales automation tools and using the latest software technology. Assigning roles and responsibilities based on their specialties can fuel sales growth and make a happier and satisfied sales team due to the following reasons: A person is more successful when they focus on what they are good at. Specializing in one or two roles spares one from time-consuming activities, which may require multitasking It helps the salesperson to consolidate resources toward achieving the sales goals At times creating silos for certain roles and functions may help in streamlining processes that can be further integrated with other roles to maintain a collaborative and sustainable growth environment within the organization. 3. Coaching at an individual level Personalized and regular coaching to the team members helps in assessing their performance and bottlenecks faced while achieving their KRAs and KPIs. Focusing on individual sales team members presents them with a transparent window to share the challenges they face in contributing their best. At the same time, you can identify team-wide challenges as well as individual issues. This approach makes it simpler to set achievable goals and implement effective strategies to meet team and individual goals. At times, the services of a professional coach can be engaged to conduct a gap analysis for each employee to identify the gaps that need to be filled up for that employee. These gaps can be Knowledge, Skill, and Attitude (KSA) related gaps. This will help you crystalize the exact coaching and training needs of that employee. 4. Offer out-of-the-box incentives Out-of-the-box incentives can keep your team motivated and highly charged. Some of them are as follows:- Plan a surprise movie screening for the team and their family during the weekend. Appreciate top performers at regular team meetings rather than waiting for the annual appraisal Offer to switch roles with them for a day. Highlight their success stories in the company’s newsletter. Reward them with a “late-punch in and early punch-out” for a whole week when they achieve smaller targets. Ask customers to share their testimonies about the sales team members regarding the management of their respective accounts successfully and publish these on the company’s website. Make sure to think of more fun and enjoyable moments that could be used along with incentive programs. In Sales Management Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, the complex world of Sales Management is defined and elaborated in a fun and easy-to-understand way. Buy Sales Management Essentials and start learning about this field today!

Our newest title, Sales Management Essentials You Always Wanted to Know, will release on April 8, 2022. If you’d like to read and review the book before its release, click here to request the Advance Reader Copy on Netgalley. Join us in conversation with Vishal Desai, author of Sales Management Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, as he talks about the book and its main focus of study – sales management. Vishal Desai has worked extensively in the areas of sales and marketing strategy, brand and product management and corporate strategy. His area of expertise lies in launching new products with the right marketing strategy and managing products through their entire life cycle. His portfolio of brands launched while working at Indian licensee companies, includes Sony PlayStation One, Slumdog Millionaire, Spiderman, WWE Raw and several other entertainment franchises across the gaming and movie industry. In Sales Management Essentials You Always Wanted To Know (Sales Management Essentials), he compiles his vast experience and theory into one exciting, informative book. Read on to find out more about Sales Management Essentials. We all know what sales is. But what is sales management and why do we need it? Sales as a function acts as the bridge between an organization and the final consumers it intends to serve through its market offering. Sales is where most of the action in a business lies because it is a crucial revenue-generating function. That’s why sales management is extremely important to meet the challenges of increasing competition levels in the marketplace. Effective sales management helps an organization to optimize results from its selling and sales force management efforts to achieve the organization’s revenue targets. It is thus imperative for one to be familiar with various aspects of sales management. What does the book have to offer? Sales Management Essentials You Always Wanted to Know is a book that deals with all the essentials of sales management which are required to make decisions about sales channels, selling techniques, distribution strategy, sales promotion tools and sales force management to achieve the desired sales objectives. It enumerates the important facets of sales management. The book explains each aspect of sales management in a lucid manner and a structured format, so that it is an easy read for the readers. It addresses the need of having a book which acts as a concise ready reckoner on sales management which spares you the effort to read through a traditional and voluminous textbook. The established as well as recent practices followed by organizations in the function of sales management are discussed in the book. Who can use this book? This book can be helpful to students, entrepreneurs as well as executives working in the sales department of an organization who wish to apply the learnings from the book in their professional life. The book also serves as an excellent aide for faculty members who teach courses or programs in Sales, Distribution or Marketing Management at colleges and universities. What’s inside the book? It contains many relevant examples, tables, charts and diagrams for better understanding of various sales management concepts and their practical applications.  At the end of each chapter there is either a case study or a class assignment or a role play activity which can be administered by the faculty to reinforce the learnings from the chapter and to enhance the teaching learning process. Every chapter has a set of three quizzes, each with ten multiple choice questions and their respective answer keys to engage the students. Could you give us a brief overview of the chapters? The chronology of the chapters of the book is aligned such that the initial few chapters of the book familiarize the reader with the introductory topics of sales management and the subsequent chapters discuss some advanced topics. The book also throws light on the recent developments in sales management like Direct to Consumer (D2C) sales channel, Omni Channel sales and the shift from product selling to concept selling. Each chapter also outlines, at the beginning, the key learnings to be gained by the reader from that chapter. Moreover, each chapter contains a ‘Chapter Summary’ which summarizes the discussions of the chapter. The book ends with a concluding chapter on the impact of a pandemic on sales management practices. By the end of the book, readers will be able to: Get a complete understanding of the concepts and approaches required for effective decision making in sales management. Understand how to select, manage and evaluate the sales channel members. Implement various sales strategies in your organization to maximize its sales revenue in today’s competitive marketplace. Learn how to manage strategic and key client accounts of an organization. Appreciate the importance of sales force management and manage the sales force effectively. Learn various sales promotion tools and techniques to increase sales revenue of the organization you work for. Understand how to handle conflict situations in a sales management role.   Sales Management Essentials You Always Wanted To Know is set for release on April 8, 2022. However, you can read an Advance Reader Copy on Netgalley now.     When on NetGalley, click on the ‘Read Now’ button to request the Advance Reader Copy. Grab this opportunity to read the book before its release and leave your feedback on Netgalley.