The document provides guidance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on developing effective sales and marketing strategies. It recommends that SMEs: 1) Conduct an audit of their current sales and marketing activities to understand strengths and weaknesses. 2) Develop a customer-focused strategy through market research to understand customer needs. 3) Implement the strategy through a clear plan with objectives, communication tactics, and process improvements. 4) Closely monitor results and make adjustments if targets are not being met.

1. vistage.co.uk
Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3:
Sales and Marketing
The quality of your business’s sales and marketing will define its success,
but too few SMEs have a well-executed strategy in place

2. Foreword
The recipe for business success is
deceptively simple. First you need to
make sure more prospective customers
know about the high-quality, value-for-
money products and services available
from your business. Then you need to
turn those potential customers into real
ones who will buy what you’re selling.
That’s another way of saying that the
quality of your sales and marketing will
define your business’s future – the extent to
which it is able to grow profitably. And that’s
why it’s crucial that business leaders set out
clear strategies for sales and marketing, with a
well-defined plan of execution and measurable
targets. Unless you’ve thought about where your
revenues will come from in the future – and how
to secure them – how can you be confident that
your business will flourish and grow?
While sales and marketing may start from the top,
it’s important to recognise that they should be
priorities for every single area of the organisation
– and not just sales and marketing. Everything your
business does represents an opportunity to enhance
its quality, establish its reputation and drive more sales.
That means all employees should be signed up to the
mission to improve customer service.
Steve Gilroy, CEO
Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 32
Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3:
Sales and Marketing
The quality of your business’s sales and marketing will define its
success, but too few SMEs have a well-executed strategy in place
vistage.co.uk

3. Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 54
Official statistics show that several hundred
thousand businesses are launched in the
UK every single year. The bad news is that
over half of them are unlikely to survive
beyond five years. Even fewer will make the
transition from SME to large company – the
number of businesses breaking through
into higher revenue brackets has actually
been decreasing in recent times, according
to the bi-annual Barclays and Business
Growth Fund (BGF) Entrepreneurs Index.
One of the reasons for this is that too few
businesses think critically about their sales
and marketing strategies. They take a
scattergun approach with little forethought
about their activities, or they only begin to
focus on sales and marketing when they’re
already in a position of weakness – because
sales have started to sag, for example.
True marketing-oriented businesses have a
sharp focus on what their customers need
right now and what they will need in the
future. They engage in activities that will
increase the number of
customers turning to them
to satisfy those needs. And
they meet that demand by
demonstrating the value
their products and services
will deliver.
Get it right and your marketing
efforts will consistently generate
new leads that your sales team
can convert into additional –
and often recurring – revenues.
But that requires a commitment
to strategic direction. A recent
McKinsey research report found
that 45% of fast-growing companies
invest a high proportion of their sales
budgets on long-term goals, half
spend much more than average on
training their salespeople, and two-
thirds of the most successful businesses
have undertaken a major performance
review over the past
three years.
The Problem -
Why Sales and Marketing Matter
45% of fast-growing companies invest a
high proportion of their
sales budgets on
long-term goals.
McKinsey
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4. Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 76
Two-thirds of the most successful
businesses have undertaken a major
performance review over the past three years.
McKinsey
vistage.co.uk

5. How, then, do you move towards a more
strategic focus on sales and marketing in
your business? There’s no one-size-fits-all
solution, but with our four-step approach
to formalising your activities, your business
should be able to make substantial
improvements:
1. Audit
Your starting point should be to
understand in detail what sales and
marketing activities the company is
currently engaged in, how those activities
are being undertaken, and what results
they are achieving. Until you know where
the company currently stands, you can’t
begin to think about how to take
it forward.
Part of this process will be to address the
question of resources. Not all businesses
have standalone sales and marketing
functions – your company may not yet
have grown to a scale that would justify
these, for example. Either
way, look at whether
you currently have the
right level of expertise
internally to execute sales
and marketing strategies
effectively. Do you have
professional marketers, for
example? Are your sales
teams well trained and well
supported? Where there are
gaps you are unable to plug
internally, it may make sense to
hire an external consultant.
It’s also important to understand
whether the external view of
your company reflects the efforts
it has been making so far. Talk to
customers, suppliers and other
stakeholders about their impression
of the business – what it does well
and where it is less effective. Do those
stakeholders have a clear vision of what
you stand for? Are they inclined to do
more business with you in the future?
Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 98
The Solution - How Do SMEs
Approach Sales and Marketing
More Strategically?
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6. Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 1110
2. Strategise
Based on the results of your audit, you can begin
to put a sales and marketing strategy in place.
This should begin with the customer. The biggest
mistake many SMEs make is to concentrate all
their energies on talking about the benefits of their
products and services, rather than trying to find out
what customers actually need. No matter how good
your company’s offering is, you won’t be able to sell it
to a customer whose needs it doesn’t meet.
Your sales and marketing strategy should therefore start
with rigorous market research. Use feedback mechanisms
such as customer surveys, customer complaints, face-to-
face conversations, industry research and trade publications
to dig deep into what your customers are buying, when and
how, and what they will look for in future.
The exact questions you ask will depend on your business
goals – for example, are you looking to sell more of your
existing range or move into a new product area? Is the current
market large enough to support your growth ambitions? But
your aim should always be to understand what existing and
potential customers need, how and where they will buy it, and
what they are prepared to pay.
Your sales and marketing strategy then becomes a vision of how
you will respond to your customers in the short, medium and longer
term. It enables you to prioritise those areas of the business that are
well aligned with the marketplace and to develop the business in
areas where customers’needs aren’t being fully met at present.
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3. Implement
The implementation stage requires to you
to translate your marketing strategy into a
plan of action that you will then execute. This
plan has to be communicated clearly to the
entire business, so that everyone understands
their role and responsibilities. It should set
out specific and measurable objectives,
with targets that you will use to measure
progress over time. These might include, most
obviously, sales targets, but other metrics are
important too – lead generation, number of
new customers, average transaction value
and so on.
The plan should also set out how you will
communicate with existing and potential
customers. One effective way to do that is to
build a schedule for the year that identifies
what you will do during the most significant
trading periods. That might be Christmas
for some companies, say, but the summer
months for others. Focus your sales and
marketing efforts accordingly, but don’t go
completely silent during quieter periods –
you should be communicating at all times.
Think carefully about the format of
communications. This might include general
brand awareness exercises such as public
relations and advertising, as well more specific
campaigns using direct
marketing tools. Think
about the mix between
digital and traditional
forms of communicating,
but don’t neglect face-to-
face contact. Where you
have large accounts with
key customers, pay particular
attention to how you will
manage them.
Meanwhile, your sales and
marketing plan should also
span broader work. New
product development should
be in the mix. So too should your
distribution network. Also, plan
when you will conduct training,
particularly for sales teams.
And do your processes
and technology support
your sales and marketing
efforts – do you need a
new customer relationship
management (CRM)
system, for example?
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4. Control
Unless you monitor the success of
your sales and marketing closely,
you can’t be sure that it’s achieving
the results you hoped for. Look at
the extent to which the business is
reorienting itself towards the strategy
you have developed, and evaluate
whether you are hitting the targets on
your sales and marketing plan.
If you’re on target or ahead of schedule,
you may want to recalibrate your sales and
marketing efforts to make the objectives
more ambitious. Alternatively, if you’re falling
short, look at why this is – the original goals
may have been unrealistic, for example. They
might still be achievable with new priorities –
more training for the sales team, say, or a focus
on one particular communication method that is
paying off.
The most important point here is to create feedback
loops that keep you constantly informed about the
progress your company is making. These should
span both the internal performance monitoring
you undertake, and also external feedback. Look
for informal feedback from customers and other
stakeholders, but also pay attention to specific metrics
– the net promoter score, for example, measures how
positively people feel about your business.
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9. Tony Altham, the Managing Director of
AdGiftsOnline, launched the promotional
merchandise company with his wife Stephanie, and
was initially very successful. But when the recession
hit in 2007, the company lost a number of key clients
and Altham began to regret his lack of experience
in sales and marketing.“Our conversion rate dropped
from 40% to less than 10% and our gross profit
margins plummeted,”he recalls.“We struggled badly
and I didn’t have anyone else that I could talk to about
the business”.
Part of Altham’s response was to join Vistage, the peer
group mentoring and coaching organisation that puts
business leaders together to share and resolve common
problems and challenges. While he lacked experience in
certain areas of the business, other members of his group
were able to offer crucial advice.“I felt all of a sudden I’d found
an environment where I could talk openly about my business
in confidence with a peer group who could advise me,”he says.
Having taken on board this advice, Altham developed a
new sales and marketing strategy that soon paid off, helping
AdGiftsOnline to win a number of sizeable new clients. The
business survived the recession and continues to prosper. In 2014,
the company grew by 60%, in 2015 the number of employees more
than tripled, and further strategic development is now planned.
Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 1716
Case Study -
AdGiftsOnline
In 2014, the company grew
by 60%, in 2015 the number
of employees more than
tripled, and further strategic
development is now planned.
vistage.co.uk

10. If you’re ready to start developing a more
coherent sales and marketing strategy and plan of
execution for your business, consider the following
action points:
• Identify routes to understanding your
customers better – What exactly is it they want
from the products and services you offer, or
could offer?
• Look at the market in which you operate –
Consider factors that are beyond your control,
ranging from the state of the economy to the
availability of staff.
• Consider your competitors – Think about what they do
now compared to your business, and how they might
respond to your efforts to improve sales and marketing.
• Evaluate strengths and weaknesses – Include the views of employees, customers
and other stakeholders in your analysis of what the business is doing well, or not.
• Focus on the“four Ps”– Look at your product, develop a pricing strategy, plan your
promotions, and don’t neglect place (how you distribute).
Business Leader’s Library. Volume 3: Sales and Marketing 1918
Our Recommended
Action Points for
Business Leaders
• Address resources – Do you have the right people, processes and technologies in
place to execute your sales and marketing plans? If not, consider investments
such as training and IT renewal, while focusing on those areas where the return
will be greatest.
vistage.co.uk

11. Sales and marketing
success will make or break
your business’s future so
you need a strategy
for growth.
Too few SMEs put an
understanding of their
customers’needs at the
heart of their sales and
marketing strategies.
SMEs must monitor the
progress of their sales
and marketing strategies
closely - and recalibrate if
they don’t achieve
their targets.
Takeaways:
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