Do you struggle to get your company to invest in building digital relationships? If you do, your organization is missing a huge opportunity to grow revenue and reach.
Companies have worked in the last several decades to wring every possible growth percentage from their selling efforts. If you pop “Profitable Revenue Growth” into Google you’ll receive 1.8 million results on imperatives, strategies, and sales initiatives with very little mention of digital marketing or sales enablement.
It’s hard to disagree with the fact that the dynamics of selling, and human interaction for that matter, have drastically changed over the last three to five years. Yet there are few companies who lay out a specific roadmap to aligning sales and marketing transformation to an economy dominated by digital. Simply put, digital sales and marketing can help your organization amplify profits. That’s a main driver for any for-profit business. So, investing in digital is really a no-brainer. But, you need a focused approach. With that in mind, here are five areas where digital tools can help lead to greater profit.
OPPORTUNITY VOLUME
Increasing the number of leads coming in the door is pretty obvious. Market leading companies are already leveraging digital marketing techniques like inbound, outreach, and mobile marketing. If you’re not, then you’re probably behind. And If you’re a business leader who doesn’t consider these techniques relevant, then you may need to reassess your strategy.
Delivering market dominance requires establishing a “Digital Mindset and Culture.” Opportunity volume is increased through expanding or extending your market using digital tools. As an example, selling to a new segment of the market might not have been possible or profitable in the past, but now it is. This is because you’re granted access to customers you never had before. Now you can extend your reach into new market segments, territories, or nations across the globe.
Other means of increasing volume include digitally-enhancing current products, creating new products, or leveraging technology to create new subscription services. If you work with or distribute products or services through partners, perhaps your investment in digital tools can impact them as well. Smaller partners may not be able to afford going at it alone but could use the support of a service through your company to help boost their sales efforts.
There are several ways to create passive recurring revenue streams leveraging the knowledge you have, the tools you develop, the systems you install, the data you own, etc… With the Internet of things rapidly exploding, have you considered ways to create competitive advantage by connecting your products to other products or applications? Taking the time to identify means of increasing opportunity volume is a critical dimension to driving more revenue.
EFFECTIVENESS
Developing or improving seller effectiveness is a worthy investment. However, have you ever lost one of your best salespeople or one of your best customers because a certain salesperson left you? Was it painful to your bottom line? That’s why maximizing your digital sales & marketing capabilities is extremely valuable; your technology investments never leave you.
The beauty of technology is you tell it exactly what you want it to do and it does it, systematically! Ok, it does it most of the time, as long as the programing isn’t faulty. So provided the buying process and customer journey can be somewhat defined, the ability to improve conversion effectiveness is there. As the saying goes, if it can be defined, it can be repeated. If it can be repeated, it can be made into a process. If it can be made into a process, it can be automated… Speeding up the buying process, increasing opportunity size, improving conversion rates and/or percentages are all possibilities for improving sales/marketing effectiveness, thereby driving more profitable revenue.
Digital marketing and sales enablement can augment direct selling efforts but also can act as a standalone enhancer to consistently upselling, cross-selling, and nurturing business potential leading to incremental revenue improvement.
PRODUCTIVITY
Increasing your sales team’s ability to handle a larger volume of opportunities by digitally enhancing their selling practices also has potential. Think about it if every seller could handle just ten more prospects, and ten percent of those prospects did one more deal with you, provided the incremental cost is less than your average sale… Booyah, show me the money! And if you enable your partners with the same capabilities: cha ching, mo money!
Finding the optimal balance between human effort and technology in all aspects of marketing and selling can produce significant increases in performance but even greater financial gain from the advantages derived in improvements to customer experience.
CAPACITY / SCALE
Digital offers the ability to scale-up by keeping your business open 24/7. If you get the right content out there, attract people to your site, and turn on eCommerce, BAM, even more revenue will start to flow. Channel expansion is another way to scale using digital tools. Maybe it’s time to go direct to the consumer. If you’re concerned about your current distribution channels, you can begin to develop a relationship with your products’ end customer and still have the business come through your channel. Having a direct relationship with the customer is better for you, reduces your risk, and enables you to measure the value you deliver to your distribution channels.
If you couldn’t really support a partner channel before, maybe digital can open that possibility. Again, it’s simple Business 101.
LONGEVITY
Last but certainly not least, have you ever examined your customer lifetime value. I don’t know how many times it was drilled into my head that it cost five times as much to gain a new customer as it does to keep the customer you have. Loyalty demands a premium; use digital as a tool to keep your customers longer. And while you’re at it, work on delivering an exceptional experience that leads to advocacy. You want people talking about how great their experience was with you, attracting even more customers than your sales force.
What effective digital marketing can do is help you serve your customers more efficiently and effectively. When properly utilized it lowers the cost of each customer engagement while giving you the opportunity to wow each specific customer in a way that will compel them to share their experience with your organization to their networks. Digital marketing also allows you to amplify profits. As a business your goal should be to amplify profits. That’s not to say you should be motivated by greed, but through profit amplification you will be serving your mission, to be a positive influence in the human economy. If you’d like to learn more about using profit amplification to become a stronger organization, consider attending our upcoming Profit Amplification Course where we educate leaders on using digital marketing and lean techniques to lower cost and raise revenue. And continue working to build deeper digital relationships. In the end, this will make you a greater and more gainful organization.
About the Author
Vaughn Rachal is a gifted customer engagement, experience, and revenue generation evangelist on a mission to empower exponential increases in marketing reach, revenue generation, and sales capacity. Applying decades of leadership experience with practical “know how” on sales, sales enablement, and marketing, he equips FPOV clients to gain a competitive advantage through the proper adoption and use of digital technologies.