Small Business Growth Strategies: Create Resources to Support Sales" loading="lazy">
The ultimate goal of a business is to earn revenue.
Nobody gets into any business with the goal of wasting precious time or losing loads of money. In the mind of every person who endeavors to put up a business is the hope that there will be an influx of sales, that revenue will be earned, and that growth will eventually be achieved.
What are business owners supposed to do to aid the fulfillment of these aspirations?
As most entrepreneurs would probably tell you, among the ways to meet the goals you set for your business is channeling all your efforts and resources towards it. In the context of small business growth, what exactly does this mean?
It simply means that the strategies and resources that spring from your efforts must be geared towards a sale. This leads us to the question, what resources help your business with sales?
In this article, we will discuss what resources help your business with sales and why create resources that support your sales process in the first place.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
What Resources Help Your Business with Sales?
We can name a lot of resources that help your business with sales, depending, of course, on the sort of business you run.
However, the resources that are common in most, if not all businesses, would be the marketing and customer service resources that are in place within the systems built.
Your customer service resources can pertain to the people who are employed to address issues involving customer service. While they are ideally supposed to support your sales process, your marketing resources are at the forefront of your lead generation, which, eventually, translates to sales.
Marketing resources include your social media platforms, your content marketing in the form of a website and blogs, through your email newsletters, among others.
If you think about it, these are the resources that offer the most support to your sales.
The tactics and strategies utilized to market your products or services influence how you perform in sales. It would therefore be beneficial for you to understand how your marketing resources support your sales process.
Let’s discuss that in the next section.
How Your Marketing Resources Support Your Sales Process
As we have already established, your marketing resources include your social media channels, websites, blogs, and various other platforms for content marketing.
With the current generation of consumers, the sales process begins the moment they embark on their buyer’s journey, which usually starts around the time they begin researching for solutions to the many challenges they face in their day to day lives.
Think about this, when you need something, do you drive to some store to ask what products you can use to address a particular situation you are in? No. Almost like a reflex, you pick up your phone or switch on your laptop and type questions in the google search bar.
Where do you find the answers?
In websites, in blogs, on a Facebook page dedicated to a product, brand, or service that you can buy, or reach out to for inquiries should you need more details before making a decision.
This is the journey that all buyers go through before they decide to make a purchase… before you can land a sale.
This is how your marketing resources support your sales process – by doling out information that your prospects need while they are still not sure about the sort of solution that can best resolve the challenges they face.
Maintaining a strong online presence that people can access and engage with as they search for solutions to their particular pain-points will position you as a brand that people can rely on for useful and informative content, and ultimately, as a brand they can trust.
In addition, your website should be a digital relationship builder, not just a billboard offering insights to how awesome you and your business happen to be. Building a “resources” section on your website where people can download engaging content could begin their buyer’s journey while doubling as resources used by your sales team to support your sales process.
These resources could become “assets” shared between steps in the sales process to help determine a prospect’s interest if their engagement activity were “trackable“ - this is referred to as sales intelligence. These resources (or sales assets) could include eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, client success stories, checklists, calculators - the list is practically endless and limited only by one’s imagination!
Once an online visitor downloads a “free resource” from your website, you could further their engagement by offering a free webinar, a free audit (website, SEO, software, etc.), a free consultation, or more. If your online visitor is a marketing qualified lead (MQL), continuing to guide your website visitor through their buyer’s journey online could possibly help them become a sales qualified lead (SQL). If your online visitor has already engaged your sales team, returning the “prospect” to your website for further information about your business and its services could very possibly shorten the sales cycle.
It would be surprising, just how your marketing resources support your sales process. Yet the rise and fall of the number of your sales, is truly indicative of how well your marketing is, and how vastly your marketing resources are being accessed and used by prospects.
Final Take: Why Create Resources that Support Your Sales Process?
So again, why create resources that support your sales process?
Your marketing resources serve as a salesperson that introduces your product, convinces prospects, and guides them towards making the decision to buy or not buy your products/services.
While consumers tend to shun traditional sales people when they make sales pitches about the brands they work for, marketing resources you have strategically positioned all over the internet do the job of selling your products in such a subtle way that consumers don’t even realize, even after making a purchase. And what an awesome way that is to sell and grow your business.
