Outside Consultant: The best sales strategy starts with knowing your customer

question

My business, KeyInsite, provides marketing analysis on-demand services for small- to medium-sized businesses. How can we best deploy effective sales strategies for our company?

Pratibha Vuppuluri

Founder & Principal at KeyInsite

answer

As you are aware, small- and medium-sized businesses have a unique set of needs. Therefore, any marketing and/or sales strategy needs to be informed by a comprehensive understanding of what specific problems your customers are looking to resolve using your products and services. To help you along the way, I have broken the process down into steps. Hopefully this can serve as a guide as you redevelop your sales strategy.

Know your customer. The first step toward developing an effective sales strategy is understanding what your customers' pain points are. To gain insight here, look at the world through your customers' viewpoint; it will likely be quite revealing.

Leverage your knowledge. Once you have gained a better understanding of your customers' problems, customize your offerings to best suit their needs. As I noted above, you cannot envision small or medium enterprises being interested in an "off-the-shelf" service. Generic offerings may not address their needs, so I would encourage you to use the knowledge of their problems to develop a customized service.

Communicate effectively. Once the service is developed, pay special attention to how you are communicating it to your customers. Emphasize how your service addresses their problems and helps them achieve their goals. Remember, your product must ultimately help your customer achieve their goals.

Ensure you are ready. Pay special attention to how your service is rolled out to your customers. Make sure that your service seamlessly integrates with your customers' existing infrastructure. In your case, it will be your customers' existing marketing research infrastructure. As always, make sure to be in touch with your customers after the service is deployed to make sure that they are satisfied with their purchase decision.

About the author

Avinash Malshe is an associate professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.