Strategies to Enhance Your Sales & Marketing and Increase Value

m&a sales & marketing Oct 07, 2024

If you're considering selling your business, or even if that’s not on the horizon just yet, you'll want to think about the next key step outlined in our Whitepaper, 7 Essential Steps to Maximizing Value When Selling Your Business. Step 2, Enhancing Your Sales and Marketing, is a vital pillar of any successful business.

As Cathedral’s CEO, Seth Buechley, puts it:

"Where’s my next dollar coming from in this business? How reliable is that dollar? And how visible is that dollar?"

Areas to Focus

At a high level, here are some areas to focus on, as any potential buyer will expect to see this type of data when evaluating your business:

  • Invest in building strong sales and marketing teams
  • Track your SEO and website traffic statistics
  • Maintain accurate customer and prospect lists
  • Demonstrate clear, actionable marketing strategies
  • Track your sales history and understand trends over time
  • Secure long-term contracts with customers

It's essential to ensure no single account represents more than 20% of your revenue. As mentioned in our recent blog post (link), a diversified revenue stream reduces risk, making your business more attractive to potential buyers. If your business depends heavily on a few customers, now is the time to focus on expanding your customer base.

Insights from Tim Hawkins, Cathedral Trusted Advisor

On Episode 77 of the Business Done Right Podcast, Seth Buechley interviewed Tim Hawkins, one of Cathedral’s Senior Advisors with 30 years of experience in sales and marketing leadership for global brands like Coca-Cola and Levi Strauss. Tim has a keen understanding of both high-performance sales strategies and the human elements that drive business success. When leaders hit a plateau and struggle to break through, Tim’s expertise helps them unlock their potential. You can listen to the full episode here.

Below are a few key strategies Tim shared, which can help enhance your sales and marketing efforts to drive growth while increasing the transferable value of your business:

Tip 1: Implement a Sales and Marketing System

Many young businesses thrive on a few key relationships but struggle to scale beyond that.
"The reason you’re not reaching the next level is that you don’t have a rigorous sales planning and tracking mechanism," says Tim. Today, there are amazing tools that can help with this, and the most essential is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM tracks and manages customer interactions and relationships, making scaling easier.

Tip 2: Use a Team-Selling Approach to Strengthen Customer Relationships

Often, businesses rely too heavily on a single charismatic salesperson. While effective, this creates a risky dynamic where the salesperson essentially "owns" the relationship—and by extension, the business.

To mitigate this risk, a Team-Selling or Relationship Mapping strategy can be implemented. This approach distributes customer relationships across multiple team members, including the owner, ensuring no single individual controls the company's sales results.

Tip 3: Identify What’s Truly Holding Back Your Sales Growth

Sometimes, what’s stopping your sales from growing isn't what you expect. It might not be a lack of leads but a lack of salespeople or the wrong skill sets. In younger companies, it’s common for one person to handle both sales and marketing, which can cause one area to flourish while the other is neglected.

Tim advises conducting a Strategic Planning Process to identify the real barriers to growth. Clarifying your strategy and performing a Gap Analysis will reveal where to focus your efforts—whether that's hiring new talent, improving operations, or addressing inventory issues.

Customer Scorecard

Another valuable way to assess what’s limiting your growth is by conducting a Customer Scorecard. Ask your top 10 customers how well your business is supporting them.

If they score you a perfect 10, you’re likely ready for growth. But if the scores are lower, it may indicate areas where improvements are needed before you can scale successfully. The scores can guide the next steps, whether that means hiring a marketer, a salesperson, or focusing on operational efficiency.

If you’re ready to take your sales and marketing efforts to the next level, these tips from Tim Hawkins can provide you with actionable steps to strengthen your business, whether you’re planning to grow or position for a future sale.

Start today by scheduling a complimentary discovery call with us.

 

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