Sales Micro-Marketing
My blog post yesterday, featuring the uncanny realisation of how the top performing reps tend to run their own mini “campaigns”, made me hunt through some old files.
This was because couple of years ago I worked closely with a young dynamic technology business which, despite all its winning new ideas, was riven with an ego-driven lack of customer care and individual salesrep bunker mentality.
Mainly telephone based, their reps quickly sunk or swam. Yet even those keeping their heads above water bemoaned the lack of any real marketing support. As a business, they believed marketing’s role was to provide leads for salespeople. Quality leads. Leads which turned to orders by the end of the month. As you might imagine, the tension would often snap causing all sorts of problems.
To help bring the two parties more together, Marketing came up with a potentially brilliant idea. Yet it failed. Here’s a launch doc, in its entirety:
What is Micro Marketing?
Micro Marketing is a program where Marketing works with selected individuals or groups within Sales to jointly deliver targeted marketing campaigns. These campaigns will focus on routes to new business from existing and prospect clients.
The Micro Marketing objectives
• To generate revenue across the board, contributing to overall, branch and individual sales targets, continuous lead generation and a feed into the branch business plan
• To provide a process that will enable the smooth delivery of Micro Marketing campaigns within the business
• Improve sales competency, identifying product/sector/sales inadequacies which can be targeted with training, a feed into each sales persons individual business plan
What’s in it for you?
Increased Volume of Leads
Increased Volume of Revenue
Increasing your Revenue per Capita
Increasing your client base
Recognition
What is the next step?
Once you have decided you would like to undertake a Micro Marketing campaign you will need to complete a Micro Marketing Request Form and submit it to the Marketing team.
Can you already sniff failure? A couple of keen reps immediately got on the case, but word soon spread that it was a nightmare process devoid of worthwhile results. The work involved by the rep to help get everything ready was considered too onerous and not exactly their job anyway. Time consuming preparation proved difficult to transfer onto the next job, and when results did not instantly materialise, momentum vanished.
“Micro-Marketing” as so-called in this example should be a winner. Imagine if every month a sales person could run a promo campaign specific to their turf and current issues, where the elapsed time from idea to result was about as long as the time it takes to write a Proposal. Nirvana…