COVID snuck up on us and it is fair to say that no-one was ready. The finance people, the protectors of all things good, moved quickly to protect the bottom line by cost-cutting to maintain cash flow and the business developers battened down for a war that few expected.
Budgets were frozen, growth was postponed, getting in the door became more problematic, and job keeper saved many salespeople.
The companies that attacked quickly and back out to market quickly and effectively are the ones who best come out of this situation. But what to do? Should you employ more salespeople, or maybe spend more on advertising to drive inbound and leads?
The answer to that question will vary from company to company, but what is factual across all companies and all industries is if that if your sales and marketing do not collaborate with each other and are not aligned with your buyers then your business development spend will be highly inefficiency. Aligning with your buyers means you can and should close more business and for less spend.
The key message is that the spend amount is not as important as market alignment , sadly so many companies still take an unstructured hope for the best approach.
So, who owns market alignment? Is it Sales? Is it Marketing, or is it the role of each business developer? That’s up to you, but if you are happy to spend money talking to people who won’t buy rather than those who will, then take no action.
However, if you take planning and alignment seriously then results can be increase by 200% to 300% for the same spend.
The days of allowing salespeople to guess the best companies to contact are long gone, the days of enabling external marketing resources to choose the best market are gone, the days of companies taking the time to pull everything they do and rebuild to create alignment are here, the great news is many companies won’t change, so will you?