Sales and marketing is an industry in itself. A search within Amazon’s business books section reveals no fewer than 39,677 titles listed under the topic. And while print businesses typically provide services that form an intrinsic part of other companies’ marketing campaigns, it’s fair to say that traditionally, many printers haven’t been so hot at it themselves – rather like the builder who never gets around to fixing his own roof.

But things are changing. As printing becomes a broader and increasingly high-tech discipline that is more and more competitive, so firms need to up their game to achieve their business goals. And an effective sales and marketing strategy is fundamental to that.

In today’s market, this is illustrated by the need for a more sophisticated breed of salesperson, according to George Thompson, joint managing director at recruitment specialist Harrison Scott.

The clichéd view of the successful sales rep being someone with the gift of the gab is increasingly outmoded. In fact, Thompson sees a trend away from that type of individual. What’s required in sales now is total professionalism, someone who delivers the goods – solid, ultra-reliable, good technically, good on detail and at presentations, Thompson states. Some sales people are good at speaking, but then are let down by being unreliable, or by a lack of detailed follow-up. Very, very few have the whole package. Selling is a real skill and some aspects you just can’t quantify. How, for example, do you quantify gravitas?

However, in the face of the economic downturn and tougher than ever trading conditions, some companies aren’t thinking beyond a theoretical turnover gain when recruiting, says JPL sales director Darren Rapp: Some clients are so hungry for turnover that they are not looking at the long-term. About 20% of clients will have a specific skill-set that they require. Firms need to put more time and effort into their sales teams.

Campaign trail
Sales and marketing are inextricably linked, yet within larger organisations in particular the two can often be polarised. A 2008 study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council surveyed 506 sales and marketing professionals and found that more than 55% did not have formal systems or processes in place for unifying sales and marketing functions at their companies. Aligning the two activities, whatever the size of business, is critical to overall business performance. And with so much jargon and spin abounding when it comes to different sales and marketing techniques and strategies, it’s helpful for SME businesses in particular to adopt a KISS (keep it simple, stupid) approach. One nice, straightforward definition of the difference between the two disciplines is that marketing creates opportunities, while sales brings about outcomes.

Loughton-based CW Print Group provides an interesting example of a long-established company with a strong sales presence. So strong, in fact, that clients in its core government and finance markets have been served by the same expert salesman for 30 years. And the company has never really marketed itself, until now. This change in strategy has been initiated by Richard Wayman, who became group managing director in 2005. He in turn appointed Gary Best as strategic relationship director last summer with a brief to develop new business sectors and alongside that a marketing plan. It’s been spurred by the fact that the market is changing and the types of people we are dealing with are changing too, explains Best. There’s a whole different range of people we’ve now got to get in front of. We know we deliver, but what is our core message, and what do clients expect from us?

After an extensive pitch process at the end of last year, CW has now appointed a marketing agency, preferring the flexibility of this approach against employing an internal marketing specialist. A 360 degree brand audit was carried out in December, and the results from this will inform the marketing strategy being developed. The intention is to arrive at a strategy that will run for the next three-to-four years. Our centenary is in 2012, so we are working towards that. We want to make sure our brand is as strong as ever going into that, says Best, who adds that the anticipated spend on marketing will be significant for the £10m-turnover company. Return on investment is absolutely key. We’ve got to be able to measure the return. But Richard [Wayman] is also brave enough to accept there will be some intangibles in terms of what we’re getting. Equally, I have to be able to say to our board that we’ve spent ‘X’ and this is the return.

Performance indicators
Return on investment (ROI) is certainly a hot topic in marketing circles, with marketers increasingly being required to demonstrate the efficacy of their activities with concrete, measurable outcomes. This is easier in some respects than others, as Jon Bailey, sales director at Sheffield’s ProCo, points out: We look carefully at ROI. For example, the mailers we ran at Easter gained a 36% response rate. The whole company is KPI driven so we have graphs on everything. Though marketing is a bit different because some of it is about staying on people’s radar, so isn’t immediately measurable.

Bailey sums up his approach to sales and marketing thus: Sales makes the business go round and marketing supports it. We don’t have a separate marketing person, it’s done by me from a sales angle. We put a massive emphasis on marketing, we think it’s very important and spend a fair bit on it. It has its own budget and a project map, but it changes quickly.

ProCo also employs the services of a specialist marketing agency, and has worked with the same company for 15 years. They totally understand what we’re about, Bailey adds. Being flexible and responsive is essential to ProCo’s marketing plans, which include advertising and PR activity. And while the firm practises what it preaches by using personalised targeted direct mail for some campaigns, it doesn’t print for print’s sake. We send out an e-newsletter, because if email happens to be quicker and better for a certain task, then why print it? All the activity drives people to our website, which is absolutely key.

Brand awareness and perception lie at the heart of ProCo’s activities, and the company’s distinctive ‘voice’ is evident from the content on its website. Putting out a generic thing time and again is no good, Bailey adds. We focus on short, sharp campaigns that are specific and open doors. Most of our marketing effort is probably targeted at existing customers. We keep the format simple and the idea clever. Some things don’t work, and if it doesn’t, we learn from it and try something else.

While ProCo places a lot of emphasis on e-marketing, its particular business model doesn’t fit with the use of Google AdWords, a service that’s a hot topic in itself in marketing circles alongside search engine optimisation (see Clinic, p38). In fact, the bestseller on that list of sales and marketing books on Amazon is David Viney’s Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There. 

Things like AdWords don’t really suit our business because we are focused on long-term relationships with our customers, Bailey adds. We aren’t geared up for people to just come to us via the internet wanting business cards or some such.

Changing channels
Whereas for print franchise group Printing.com, this is precisely what the company’s outlets want, and chief executive Tony Rafferty believes the business could be the industry’s biggest single spender on Google AdWords: Over £200,000 was spent with Google over the past year to ensure priority position for Printing.com with the dominant search engine of our time. The process of adapting the values of keywords and expressions is constantly updated to optimise results.
Internet marketing such as this fits within the umbrella term of ‘digital marketing’ that also includes channels that don’t rely on the internet, such as mobile phones and indeed digital outdoor displays. Client companies are increasingly focusing marketing spend on digital, and savvy printers can use their own sales and marketing efforts to show how print can both complement and enhance these channels.

MARKETING FRAMEWORK
Key considerations

• Successful marketing has traditionally involved addressing a number of key issues. These considerations were known as the ‘4Ps’: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. As marketing became a more sophisticated discipline, a fifth ‘P’ was added: People. And recently, two further ‘Ps’ were added, mainly for service industries: Process and Physical evidence.
• Planning an effective marketing strategy within the organisation is intimately bound up with the total business planning process because it is linked to overall corporate strategy and requires endorsement from the top. It also needs to be continually reviewed. Therefore, collaboration between marketing and other corporate activities is important to ensure that the marketing strategy is implemented effectively.
• SMEs that aren’t sure about sparing the resources for marketing are often carrying out more marketing than they might think. This is because marketing is often seen by SMEs as equivalent to selling, promotion and advertising. In reality, it covers a much broader range of activities, many of which SMEs do without calling them marketing.
• Applying a simple framework helps you identify which activities are effective and under what circumstances. You can then plan to use them again when appropriate.

Source: Chartered Institute of Marketing

THEORY & PRACTICE
Are sales at your company constrained?
In 1984, Eliyahu Goldratt wrote a groundbreaking book called The Goal, which introduced thousands of people to the theory of constraints. The book has become something of a cult classic in the manufacturing sector of business, but it also has valuable lessons for sales. A constraint is defined as anything that limits a system from achieving higher performance. To increase throughput (sales) you should follow a five-step process:

1. Identify all of the constraints in the sales system. All systems have at least one constraint and most have several. Sales is no exception. What are your constraints? Too few leads, too few qualified leads, too few qualified sales people to follow-up on the leads, too few people to create useful proposals to qualified buyers or something else?
2. Exploit the system’s constraints. Make sure you don’t bother to increase output of things that are not constrained. If a constraint is too few people to qualify leads, then increasing raw leads beyond the level you can qualify is a waste of system resources. Maximise the input to the constraints just to the limit of the constraint’s ability to handle it. Any more is a waste of resources.
3. Subordinate everything else to the decisions made in Step 2. This will maximise system efficiency. That is, the cost of selling will be minimised for the level of sales being achieved, but it doesn’t yet increase sales. The reason is that we have not yet relieved any constraints, we have simply acknowledged that they exist and that trying to ‘force feed’ more through the constrained system is a waste.
4. So now we must elevate the constraints. What is the one step in the process that if you expanded its capacity would increase sales? Make sure you understand what the constraint is and then expand its capacity until it is no longer the constraint.
5. Sales will increase and so there is now another constraint. Go back to Step 1 and repeat the process.

Source: Customer Manufacturing Group