Marketing and Sales

Combine, balance, and execute marketing and sales from the customer’s viewpoint.

Executives are under competitive pressures for more customers, increased revenues, greater profit, and shareholder value. Marketing and Sales Concurrent with increasing cash flow they must control associated selling, general, and administrative costs, streamline processes, improve performance across all sales, marketing, and service activities. The Thomas Group has observed, however, that many companies are at a structural disadvantage when it comes to maximizing effectiveness.

Our Approach

Marketing and Sales is one of the most important activities in a business. Marketing directly affects profitability and sales. Marketing develops and implements a continuous strategic planning process that leads to faster decision making concerning new opportunities and threats while maintaining a more integrated approach to global markets. Marketing serves as a voice of the customer inside the company as well as communicating business vision internally and externally. Marketing and Sales play an integral part in growing revenues and portraying the company’s need of compelling vision, clear priorities, and highly focused communication.

When viewed as two separate entities and processes, Marketing and Sales are disconnected, with Marketing not directly experiencing the selling process and Sales not feeding adequate customer feedback. To be successful, the Marketing and Sales processes should have a symbiotic relationship that is balanced and executed from the customer’s viewpoint.

Process Value Management ( PVM ), Thomas Group’s proprietary methodology to identify, prioritize, and quantify the amount and timing of cross-functional business improvement opportunities, can help an organization increase overall marketing and sales effectiveness.

The PVM approach focuses on Marketing and Sales performance drivers: speed (cycle time), quality (first pass yield), and productivity. Factors that typically impact these drivers include:

  • Personnel: Effective recruiting followed by the right training at the right time will produce the right results.
  • Awareness: Generating prospects requires increased awareness of your products and the solutions that they provide at a manageable budget level.
  • Lead Quality: Not all prospects are desired. Targeted messaging can increase lead quality, which leads to increased conversion rates.
  • Sales Follow-up: On average, 80% of all sales require more than five contacts before the sale closes. Follow-up speed and quality will determine ultimate conversion rates.
  • Life Time Value: This is the profitability of a current customer over time. Most companies will spend ten times more to acquire than keep a customer; yet, an existing customer is more likely to purchase, and at higher levels, resulting in more profit over time.
  • Demand Forecast: All customers buy on a cycle. Metrics that track cycle time and order value increase the accuracy of your business forecasts.
  • Product and Service Discounts: The need to discount is an indication of a marketing and sales process deficiency. The PVM methodology provides the means to identify the root cause of the problem and the process improvement resolution so discounts are not necessary.
  • Sales Cycle Efficiency: Metrics should be in place to measure overall marketing and sales effectiveness (prospect conversion rate and speed).

Components of Marketing and Sales

Well defined and aligned processes and procedures will increase Marketing and Sales program efficiency, enabling Breakthrough Process Performance. Thomas Group’s solutions to improve results, whether focused on a single activity or an entire enterprise, focus on process. Marketing and Sales solutions address:

Click here to print PDF file