Back to Page 1: Sales and Marketing Plans – What Works?
Back to Page 6: Manage Your Selling Territories Effectively Through Your Sales and Marketing Plans
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Page 7
How You Manage Each Individual Sales Rep Needs to be in Your Sales and Marketing Plans
Therefore, built into your sales and marketing plans, there is tremendous value in selecting a specific geographical region and concentrating all your strategies and efforts on being successful there first, before you expand to other regions.
When you chase two rabbits, both will escape…
When you are developing your sales and marketing plans, remember, the same is true of markets.
Focus your sales and marketing plans on a single market and be successful there first. Don’t hedge your bets, especially when you have limited resources. Select the best market, or one that you believe will be lucrative, and concentrate your efforts and expenses on that before you consider others.
When two markets are equally lucrative, select one and go after that first rather than watering down your resources and efforts on “chasing two rabbits.”
Even on the Internet, where sales and marketing plans may appear to define no geographical boundary, you still want to focus on one set of keywords or one category. Start small and dominate before you expand.
If you test a category and find it to be profitable, put all your resources into making the most from that before you water your efforts on multiple “rabbits.”
PERSONAL MANAGEMENT
The third Sales Management area in your sales and marketing plans is “personal management,” addressing how the people who sell for you spend their time and how effective they really are.
Now that we have nailed down the selling process and are effectively managing our territory, we need to concentrate your sales and marketing plans on the individuals who are doing the actual selling.
Salespeople (even you) tend to be somewhat or considerably independent in their work. This makes it easy to be distracted from the greatest priorities, especially for reps with somewhat unstructured days.
Each person has only 24-hours each day.
For reps, there is usually prime calling-time – that part of the day when it’s easiest to reach people.
If you are calling the East Coast from California or the West Coast from New York, there are only certain hours when people will be available. The rest of the day needs to be used for administrative tasks, identifying prospecting sources, research, follow-up and other tasks that are not as time sensitive. And all this should be spelled out in your sales and marketing plans.
The best reps have a creative impatience that drives them onto the phone and in front of prospects during the right times.
But most reps still need their time segmented into parts and perhaps even days where certain activities are regularly done. Your sales and marketing plans could define some kind of reporting process to define when specific weekly goals should be established (what day) and then ensure the right activities are being done to achieve these goals.
Through your sales and marketing plans, select the day and time when these activities and goals will be checked, perhaps the beginning of each week. In this way your reps (and you) will be kept on track, to make sure everyone is doing the things that were planned.
In sales as in everything else, if you cannot measure it you cannot manage it. This process, governed through your sales and marketing plans, will provide a method for monitoring and managing the otherwise unwieldy sales functions performed by you and your reps.
By breaking the selling job into its parts (see the Selling Process starting on page 1 of this article), establishing specific goals for each part, and measuring each rep’s activities and progress weekly, it’s much easier to direct salesperson to consistent success and higher results.
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See Page 8: Boosting Sales Skills and Introducing a Comprehensive Marketing Overview as Part of Your Sales and Marketing Plans