The Marketing Leaders - Marketing & Sales Standards: Are you missing out?

If you aren’t yet familiar with the new UK Standards, then you’re missing out. What’s more, the quicker you adopt the Standards, the quicker you can reap the many benefits that they offer. So what are they?

In this article I’ll provide a brief recap on how they have come about & what they are, more details being available in the accompanying article from Dr Chahid Fourali & Beth Rogers (in this issue of the marketing leaders magazine), and I’ll concentrate on why the Standards will be a ‘Win-Win’ for every business stakeholder that uses them

The Key Purpose of the Standards

Marketing: To advance the aims of organisations (whether private, public or voluntary) by providing direction, gaining commitment and achieving sustainable results and value through identifying, anticipating and satisfying stakeholder requirements.

Sales: To create, build and sustain mutually beneficial and profitable relationships through personal and organisational contact.

The Standards: a ‘Win – Win’?

For me, adopting the Standards is a no-brainer. They offer up real value to any business stakeholder that uses them. I would recommend them to all UK businesses, be they SME or FTSE100, B2B or B2C.

Here’s one or two obvious benefits for key individuals, there are many more.

By adopting the Standards in their businesses, these individuals stand to improve the effectiveness of their sales and marketing teams. What other team in any businesses is more directly linked to revenue? Here is an opportunity to quickly, and at minimal cost, improve the business function that makes the tills ring! This has to be a sure fire way of improving profits.

Sales & Marketing Management is all about hitting your numbers through the effective management of your team and its resources. To do this, you need to look beyond the results, and truly understand the knowledge/activity/skills that sit behind the numbers. The new UK Sales & Marketing Standards offer the line manager the chance to benchmark his or her staff.

By assessing each team member against the principle functions, the line manger can build upon existing knowledge and further understand, for example, why ‘Sales Person A’ hits target and ‘Sales Person B’ doesn’t. A team member’s individual competency can be stripped down, and Performance Development Plans (PDPs) produced so as to target specific requirements within each principle function. The more individually tailored a PDP is, the more impact it will have.

Most hungry sales and marketing staff are competitive, driven and ambitious. Most strive for years to get to the top of their various organisations, and the best of the best then strive to reach the top of their industry sector…perhaps by moving to a competitor. Often, however, this is where it stops. It’s often very difficult for an employee to prove their ability to prospective employers in unrelated industry sectors. In these circumstances, previous sales results mean very little as the interviewer is often totally unaware as to what they represent. For the ambitious employee, the new Standards represent an opportunity to drill down underneath the results and to demonstrate to a potential employer their activity/competency in each of the principle functions. As such, the new Standards will help a sales person to move across industry sectors and significantly improve their immediate and long term career prospects.

Be they existing customers, or prospects that haven’t yet seen the light, every customer who has a need will want to be handled efficiently and professionally. By adopting the new Marketing & Sales Standards, every business can help to ensure that their front line staff are exactly that – efficient and professional – and in so doing handle all opportunities and enquiries accordingly. This is very likely to add, and retain, more customers.

I could go on, and am often accused by friends and family of going on and on and on, but hopefully I have sparked your interest already. Now that we have the new Standards, let’s make the best use of them. They are there to be used, will be of great value to many and I would urge you adopt them into your business at the earliest opportunity.