A Dozen Sales and Marketing Commitments

timjsmith

Tim J. Smith, PhD
Founder and CEO, Wiglaf Pricing

Published December 31, 2003

Improving the sales and marketing effort is a ongoing process in which commitment is a prerequisite. To get the thought juices flowing, we offer the following 12 action items that you can personally implement. That is only one a month.

1. Explore new opportunities. Listen to new prospects that are not in the designated target market to understand their needs. Read industry journals that are not directly related to your line of business.

2. Improve customer retention rates with a relationship marketing effort. Send past and exiting customers thank you notes and success stories. Throw customers a party at your next tradeshow.

3. Execute an effort that requires close coordination between marketing and sales professionals, such as a customer contact campaign, sales message improvement effort, or service offering expansion. Make sales professionals understand the effort from the marketing perspective and marketing professionals understand the effort from the sales perspective. Create a common understanding of the challenges and potential solutions to reaching the common goal of revenue achievement.

4. Conduct formalized research to understand customer needs and their perception of your solution. Share this understanding throughout your sales and marketing organization. Request feedback on methods to take action with a fact based understanding.

5. Develop new case studies based on customer successes. Publish these case studies on your website, in brochures, and relevant media outlets.

6. Repackage a product to be sold as a service OR standardize a service to be sold as a product. Overcome the organizational challenges to execution.

7. Use a customer solution oriented elevator speech when meeting with new people. Try this template: “For Target Customers, Your Company provides the best Solution to overcoming These Customer Challenges because/as demonstrated through These Differentiating Factors and Claims.

8. LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS. In customer meetings, create an early agenda item to understand the customer’s challenge. Communicate these understandings throughout your organization.

9. Commit to making internal meetings a timely and efficient process focused on improving the team’s coordination, motivation, and execution.

10. Subscribe to the Wiglaf Journal.

11. Quantify the value of your offering using the customer’s reality as the starting point. Communicate the sources of your value consistently.

12. Execute boldly.

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About The Author

timjsmith
Tim J. Smith, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Wiglaf Pricing, an Adjunct Professor of Marketing and Economics at DePaul University, and the author of Pricing Done Right (Wiley 2016) and Pricing Strategy (Cengage 2012). At Wiglaf Pricing, Tim leads client engagements. Smith’s popular business book, Pricing Done Right: The Pricing Framework Proven Successful by the World’s Most Profitable Companies, was noted by Dennis Stone, CEO of Overhead Door Corp, as "Essential reading… While many books cover the concepts of pricing, Pricing Done Right goes the additional step of applying the concepts in the real world." Tim’s textbook, Pricing Strategy: Setting Price Levels, Managing Price Discounts, & Establishing Price Structures, has been described by independent reviewers as “the most comprehensive pricing strategy book” on the market. As well as serving as the Academic Advisor to the Professional Pricing Society’s Certified Pricing Professional program, Tim is a member of the American Marketing Association and American Physical Society. He holds a BS in Physics and Chemistry from Southern Methodist University, a BA in Mathematics from Southern Methodist University, a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago, and an MBA with high honors in Strategy and Marketing from the University of Chicago GSB.