Tag: sales - Page 4

Marketing Eye has for years focused on the small to medium sized business market. We have done incredibly well specialising in providing businesses that are looking to catapult their business growth by providing them with a qualified outsourced marketing department.

We are about to embark on our last quarter of the financial year, and like most companies, we are seeking to accelerate our sales performance and leverage our current marketing structure and assets.

Marketing Eye is one of Australia's most recognisable marketing consulting firms due to our online performance. We were early adopters of everything from websites through to social media use. We know that every single month search engine optimisation must be a priority, and blogging keeps our prospects coming back time and time again.

Marketing can often be defined as a science and a bit of luck, while sales is a skill that requires knowledge and expertise to close.

Some people are satisfied with minimal sales and minimal income, and there is no motivational factors that will ever change that. All motivating them will do, is change their expectation of entitlement.

The countdown is on and while we are all still enjoying the Spring Racing Carnival, there are a few large retailers who have already put together their Christmas displays and have started their Christmas marketing campaigns.

So what should you do? Do you start early because they have, or do you wait until it is closer to Christmas? Here is your retail marketing “TO DO” list to help you decide.

The sales manager is arguably one of the most important people in any office. Often when you are a smaller business, the entrepreneur or CEO doubles as a sales manager, and this can get a company so far, but not all the way.

Mark Twain once said “it usually takes me three weeks to write a good impromptu speech” and he probably wasn’t joking. The best speeches you’ve ever heard were meticulously scripted and rehearsed before they were delivered with that engaging element of panache that had you so hooked.

No matter whether you are a politician, motivational speaker or inside sales rep, you need a good script and you need to practice it. A dynamic script will ensure you have every base covered, including lapses of knowledge, any objections you may counter and a deep understanding and awareness of the product.

For a long time Marketing Eye has been toying with hiring an Inside Sales Executive, similar to a format that exists in the US. What has held us back in Australia is that we have not been fully equipped to train an Inside Sales Executive and therefore have been sitting on our hands when a decision has had to be made.

With an office move in Melbourne to a larger space, finally, the time had come and an opportune meeting with an American Inside Sales Specialist ensured that Marketing Eye Melbourne had their very first person in this position on board.

The lines blurred sometime in the last 10 years, but I don't know exactly when it happened.

Having started my first business at 25 years of age, specializing in technology marketing, I thought I had it all. A marketer who understood technology marketing and who could talk the talk which at that time seemed to be, the height of the dot com boom, the most lucrative marketing position one could hold.

Then of course, someone came along and started talking about company culture, and marketers took a turn to start embellishing the on-boarding process of new recruits, with a mixture of "people marketing" with "technology marketing" - and for a time, that was all the rage. It seemed to be the only thing people were talking about and marketers started to play a role in human resources, giving recruiters and in-house HR managers the tools to "sell their brands" like they were a front line sales executive needing to close the deal in order to reach their quotas.

February is a great month to take stock of where your company is heading. Closing in on the "pointy' end of the financial year in Australia, companies are taking stock of whether or not they will make their sales targets.

Marketing Eye is safely on-track, but instead of sitting back and watching the new clients come in, we are firmly placing our feet on the accelerator and going full steam ahead. Our Melbourne and Sydney offices are looking for 50 new clients before the end of the financial year. 

So, like any good manager, I have put aside a marketing budget of $150,000 to be spent on sales and marketing activities. Our internship program ensured that we had a heap of new ideas, and alongside our exposure to the US-market and the way they use technology to power marketing campaigns, I have to say, I am fairly confident that this goal is achievable.