Sales and Marketing Plans – Getting Customers to Come Back

Back to Page 1: Sales and Marketing Plans – What Works?

Back to Page 4: Outlining How to Close Sales and Wrap Up Details in Your Sales and Marketing Plans
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Getting Customers to Come Back – and Managing Sales Reps Through Your Sales and Marketing Plans

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For most businesses, the best customer is someone who has already bought from you in the past.

After all, they know you and trust you enough to have given you their money. More importantly, they have experienced your product or service, so they know how it works and have hopefully experienced the benefits first hand.

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STEP TEN — Reselling and Continuity

(getting them to come back and buy more from you).

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Now that the customer has bought from you, if the experience was positive, they are generally receptive to buying from you again.

So first of all, was the purchase experience positive enough that your customers are willing to buy more from you?

Have you made it easy for them to buy more from you?

Are they on autoship, where their credit card will be automatically charged and the updated version or next shipment will be delivered at regular intervals?

Is there some incentive that entices the buyer to come back (gas stations have punch cards – get 9 car washes and the 10th is free).

Do you have some kind of reminder system to entice the buyer to come back or let the customer know when it’s time to reorder?

How can you make it even easer for the buyer to come back and buy more from you?

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THE SELLING PROCESS IS JUST THE FIRST-THIRD OF WHAT’S COVERED IN YOUR SALES AND MARKETING PLANS

Effectively managing The Selling Process through these ten steps will help you achieve predictable growth of your revenues and profits.

But The Selling Process is just one-third of what you need. The Sales Management Process and The Marketing Process are the other legs covered in your sales and marketing plans.

Sales Management Also Gets Coordinated Through Your Sales and Marketing Plans

Once you have the selling steps working effectively, next you’ll need to address the people who are doing the actual selling for you. After all, someone needs to implement The Selling Process.

Whether you have a sales force or are doing the selling yourself, effective sales management can be essential to your success.

To more effectively manage the Sales Management process, it helps to divide it into the component parts, which are:

  1. Distribution management (when sales reps and distributors are involved),
  2. Territory management (dividing up the regions and markets into manageable parts), and
  3. Personal management (maximizing time management and skills development).


For each, let’s examine what is involved.

DISTRIBUTION MANAGEMENT

If you are selling through sales reps, outside distributors or independent reps, monitoring and managing their performance closely can make the difference between success and ultimate failure. Therefore, this needs to be built into the sales and marketing plans you develop for your business. For example,

Are retailers or resellers selling your products for you? How can you monitor them so you know who is selling effectively and who is not? How could you make sure they are all selling effectively for you? What materials, training and support could you provide that would help them be more productive in their selling of your product or service?

Generally, each different market should have different specialized reps selling into it.

Some people will do the selling themselves but will use an outside rep or firm for government, international buyers or specialized markets. Others will have different reps assigned to different types of buyers.

Even companies like Amway have dealers who specialize in selling to women, to businesses, to Fortune 500 companies, to people wanting to earn a second income, etc. Similarly, General Electric has a totally different sales force selling train engines, jet engines, turbines, etc.

The effective specialist sells more efficiently because he or she understands a specific buyer and knows how to sell to them.

Even with smaller companies which cannot have dedicated salespeople for different markets, those that are most successful tend to concentrate their selling on markets that have some types of similarity.

Still, whenever specialist salespeople could be used, concentrating on a distinct type of customer and market, results are generally improved, often significantly. There’s something about having specialists that boosts sales and profits.

 

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See Page 6: Manage Your Selling Territories Effectively Through Your Sales and Marketing Plans