If you want to grow your revenues, it’s important to know whether your company is driven by sales or marketing efforts. Sales driven companies grow by adding more sales people, while marketing driven companies grow by adding more marketing programs.  How do you know which one — sales or marketing — drives your company?

Try adding more salespeople (resellers or distributors), assign them a sales quota, and let them loose in a territory and see if your sales grow.  If you start getting more sales, you know your company is driven by sales.  If your sales fail to grow, try adding marketing activities. For example:

• Expand your website;
• Increase your public relations efforts;
• Add a company blog or a periodic newsletter;
• Expand your advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) program on the internet;
• Add more keyword focused pages to your internet marketing;
• Experiment with direct mail or email marketing;
• Attend (more) trade shows or events;
• Host your own conference for your customers and leads; and/or
• Add new products or enter new markets.

You can also try increasing your overall sales and marketing effectiveness by introducing more control over your sales and marketing cycle. If you’re unable to grow your sales by either adding sales people or expanding your marketing activities, it’s time for a strategic review. There are only two ways to grow your revenue — sales activities or marketing programs.

When neither of these works, it’s time to change your strategy.  Your business strategy is what drives marketing, and marketing is what drives your sales.

Sales and Marketing strategies and plans are critical for any business. Why leave them to chance?  The Bizmanualz Sales & Marketing Policies and Procedures manual contains procedures for developing strategy, adding sales people, and creating marketing activities. These prewritten and fully editable sales and marketing procedures can help you quickly and effectively take control of your sales and marketing processes to achieve consistent results.

What drives your organization? Sales? Marketing?

Policies and procedures provide the framework and direction for addressing many common business problems your organization might face.  Let’s look at the top ten business problems solved by Policies and Procedures.

1. Accounts Receivable procedures to reduce accounts receivable (A/R) aging and ensure even cash flow.  Every company needs Strategies for Writing Accounts Receivable Procedures.  Your accounts receivable process is the heart of your cash cycle.  Salespeople can find plenty of customers but without cash-paying customers, you can’t pay your bills, which is part of your Strategies for Writing Accounts Payable Procedures.

2. Sales procedures to standardize sales pipeline management and ensure a consistent sales pipeline.  Sales procedures allow you to take control of the sales and marketing cycle.  Developing measurements, sales assignments, and target markets are all important elements of your sales process.

3. Disaster Recovery procedures will assist in an orderly and timely response to emergencies your company may face, as well as control the inevitable chaos that occurs.  Every company needs to effectively respond to disasters or emergencies in a timely manner; if not, they could be out of business.  In recent months, we’ve had ample opportunity to learn the lessons of the Gulf oil disaster, such as “having a disaster recovery plan before the need arises”.

4. Human Resources procedures ensure non-discriminatory practices; specifically, well-defined employee hiring and termination practices will help you avoid costly litigation.  Human resources procedures address diverse topics such as recruiting, hiring, training, retention, termination, and — most importantly –complying with local, state, Federal, and even international employment laws.

5. Quality procedures (nonconformance, corrective action, and auditing) improve product and process quality.  The ISO 9001 quality standard addresses quality control, quality assurance, and quality management practices.  Learning how to meet quality standards with ISO 9001 will help your organization reduce costly rework and overtime, thereby improving quality, satisfying customers, and contributing to your competitive advantages.

6. Customer communications procedures, like collecting data from customer feedback and complaint handling for process improvement.  ”Poor customer communication” is the root cause of much customer dissatisfaction.  If you know what your target customer wants, your business has all the information it needs to satisfy the customer. Implementing communication procedures will help you act on your customers’ wants, improving sales.

7. Shipping and receiving procedures are needed to track materials purchased and sold.  Most of shipping and receiving revolves around inventory or assets, which requires processes for handling, inventory management, asset acquisition, and asset disposition.  Specific supplier requirements — and the policies and procedures that flow from them — ensure that you receive what you want, when you want it, in the quantity you want, and with quality built in.

8. Management procedures can improve poor meetings, poor internal communications, and poor reporting.  Management is really about communication — that’s why improving internal communication benefits the whole company.  One of the best ways to improve communications is to develop, document, implement, and monitor a procedure for communications.

Also, it’s important that management shows its commitment to the highest standards, whether those standards have to do with internal processes or processes that directly involve your customers.

9. You also need compliance procedures to ensure your company conforms to the requirements of various regulations, statutes, and standards.  This is where policies and procedures can help your organization.  Compliance is one of the primary problems solved with policies and procedures.

10. Accounting procedures ensure that you fulfill your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.  Accounting is a process to track transactions of items, cash, and information.  Accounting procedures help to ensure consistency, reliability, and accuracy of those transactions, which (in turn) helps to build trust in your financial statements.  What Are the Top Ten Accounting Policies and Procedures?

Prewritten policies and procedures from Bizmanualz help solve many of these common business problems.  The Top Ten Core Business Policies and Procedures you will need can be found in the Bizmanualz CEO Company Policies Procedures Manuals bundle.

Top 10 Business Problems Solved by Policies and Procedures

1. Accounts Receivable procedures, to reduce A/R aging and ensure even cash flow.
2. Sales procedures, to standardize sales pipeline management to ensure consistent sales.
3. Disaster Recovery procedures, to control the response to chaos in an emergency.
4. Human Resources procedures, to ensure non-discriminatory employee hiring and termination.
5. Quality procedures, to improve quality.
6. Customer communications procedures, to collect data from feedback and complaint handling for process improvement.
7. Shipping and receiving procedures, to track materials purchased and sold.
8. Management procedures to improve poor meetings, communications, and reporting.
9. Compliance procedures to conform to regulations, standards, and laws.
10. Accounting procedures, to fulfill your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.

What do you think? How quickly could your most urgent problems be solved by implementing effective policies and procedures?

In the office—and on this blog—we throw around the term “effective communication” a lot. In a previous post, I talked about how your entire chain of dealing with suppliers, employees, and customers should be centered on effective communication—that is, clearly explaining your products and requirements and listening and understanding others.

Do we effectively communicate with our website?

You may think you do a good job of the latter. You have a method for collecting customer requirements and feedback. You have open channels of communication with your employees and suppliers.

But what about the former? How clearly do you explain your own products and services?

We’re working on a new website that will more explicitly state the services we provide to other companies. It’s a big part of our product offering, but until recently, it’s been a small part of our website. In formatting the homepage, navigation, and other design aspects, we’re constantly asking ourselves “What would make the most sense to the customer?” It doesn’t matter what you think about your products or services. What are they looking for?

This can be very difficult to use the right words when you’re selling customized services. But when you make sure the focus is on the customer—or flat out ask the customer for their opinion—it makes things easier.

When was the last time you asked your customer whether your communication is clear to them? Have you changed text or visuals based on customer feedback?

We are doing some rework of web page content here at Bizmanualz. One thing we try to be consciously aware of is not filling our web pages with “we.”

We all like to talk about ourselves, even in business contexts, like how much expertise and experience we have. And we like to talk about our product’s great features.

But that is not usually the main thing customers want to know. What they really want to know is how it helps them. So whether you are writing web pages, product brochures, or sales sheets, minimize talking about yourself. Plus, when you talk about your product, focus more on how the product will benefit the reader and less on the technical features of the product.

For example, if you produce a cordless drill, it may be appropriate to mention that you have been manufacturing drills for 50 years, but it should not be the primary focus. Also, telling potential customers the drill has a 24 volt nickel-cadmium battery and a titanium case may be great, but it would probably be more meaningful if you tell them it will hold a charge for eight hours of drilling and stand up to the roughest use.

Experienced sales copy writers seem to agree. It is okay to tell customers about yourself and to list product features. But first tell them exactly how these things will benefit them.

This post is about effective deployment of Voice of the Customer (VOC), quality-speak for taking action to reflect what your customers want in your products and communications. This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. Yesterday, Company ‘A’ failed to adjust its product offering and marketing messages to match customers’ desires, and suffered for it. Today, Company ‘B’ gets it right.

When Company B got its foot in the door of some big-time potential accounts, it heard what customers said, and reflected those perceptions of value in its product offering.  Company B took action to sell what customers wanted right away, and then set out to increase the value of their services over time as their customers came to trust them. 

Company B also listened to the language that potential clients used to talk about their problems, and then employed that language when describing their services.  Company B took to heart what it learned in half a dozen customer interviews to focus its product development and marketing message on recognized benefits.

As the selling proposition shifted to incorporate the voice of the customer, potential clients quickly recognized the value of the service that Company B offered.  They could get exactly what they wanted and needed from Company B, and they were willing to pay for it.  More and more frequently, when Company B got their foot in the door, they settled in for a nice long stay.

 Listen to Customers, Sell More of What Customers Are Buying

When interviewing our client’s customers, we listen for what they value. We listen for what they are paying for today. Then we help customers focus their product development resources on what they can sell today. With increased sales, we can help our clients build organizations that deliver value consistently, thus building trust with their customers. Trust is a solid platform on which to deliver increasingly valuable and unique services, thus achieving our strategy. Without first building trust, strategy is simply an aspiration with no concrete steps.

Truly hearing the voice of the customer means reflecting back to them in your own language what customers truly value. Adjusting your products to provide that value demonstrates that you are truly listening.

Company A’s corporate customers thought they were buying the time of skilled installers and customer service troubleshooters on demand. In an effort to be different from its competitors who also sold skilled labor hours, Company A offered additional benefits that its skilled workers brought to the table such as cross-training and process improvement.

At first, “differentiating” the marketing message seemed like a good idea.  Essentially, Company A was offering higher levels of service that it said would help customers improve operations and save money. But when interviewed, customers didn’t seem to get it. They resisted the idea that contract hires were in a position to influence substantial changes in business practices within their companies. Instead customers said they would rather pay less and get just the services they valued.

But customers did say that Company A provided rapid availability of highly skilled, highly specialized technicians. And they would even pay a little more for what they perceived as consistent well-managed delivery of the right skills at the right time.

But Company A was unwilling to change its story. Rather it persisted in a story that was out of sync with the voice of their customer. Company A failed to separate its aspirations for the future with the current perceptions of its paying customers. But you can only ignore the voice of the customer for a time.

When the recession hit a few months later and corporations sought to cut expenses, services they did not immediately value were hard to justify, and easy targets. As a result, Company A lost several customers and a double-digit percent of its revenue.

Tomorrow, read about Company B.  Because sometimes, listening means changing your story.

Today is a big day here at Bizmanualz.  Colin Gray from Platinum Registration is conducting our first-ever ISO 9001 certification audit. (Yes, we are going for our ISO certification.) Over the past couple of years, we’ve been incorporating the ISO process model into the way we do business.

Colin Gray (left), Platinum Registration auditor, reviews visual management board with Bizmanualz managing director Chris Anderson (right).

There are many posts and articles on our site about ISO 9001, so I don’t need to explain it here. In this post, I’ll offer my perspective as a non-ISO sales and marketing guy on the importance of ISO 9001 to sales, marketing, growth, and the health of our organization.

ISO 9001 gives us the common language, measurement, and follow-through tools we need to achieve our goals for ourselves and our clients. ISO helps us do what we say we will do and achieve what we want to achieve. Simply put, ISO 9001 helps us walk the walk.

If you sell services for a living (like I do), you probably know where I’m going with this. Every time you meet with a prospect or client, you put your reputation on the line. Doing your job requires that clients trust you enough to share their problems with you. Keeping that trust depends on your and your organization’s consistent performance, keeping promises made to each and every client. And that’s what ISO 9001 helps us do — it helps us keep the promises that we make.  And that is “performance by design, not by accident,” as Colin said during our opening audit meeting.

ISO Helps Us Define and Deliver Customer Solutions Reliably, Predictably

Assessing client needs, defining solutions, and developing plans to meet the needs is what I do as a sales executive. Statements of work (SOWs) I write are promises that we are built to keep because we are built using ISO. While all successful sales people grasp the importance of uncovering customer’s needs, ISO has helped us dig deeper to uncover multifaceted and sometimes conflicting needs. ISO has helped us understand risks to performance and to client’s satisfaction with our work. ISO has helped us dig deeper. ISO has helped us verify that we are meeting customer needs. ISO has helped us improve continuously. ISO has helped me become a better sales executive. We’re writing an article this month about how we used ISO-inspired planning to select and pursue sales targets for a client, part of our sales and marketing services for them.

ISO Helps Us Communicate More Effectively

Applying the Plan-Do-Check-Act, or PDCA, model — the basis of ISO 9001 — to our marketing process has helped make our marketing results predictable. “Planning” when preparing product descriptions, case studies, and other communications means listening to customers. “Checking” means measuring customer reaction and behavior on our web sites, and asking them directly what they are getting from our marketing stories. “Acting” means improving our stories based on what customers tell us. In essence, ISO reinforces a culture of listening to customers. We are working on an article this month that compares and contrasts one client who demonstrates the value of listening, and one that simply tells their story no matter what their customers are telling them.

ISO helps us take concrete steps every day to attain our goals and aspirations for ourselves and our clients.  Our articles this month will show how ISO thinking and tools has helped me make and keep promises in Sales, and communicate more effectively in Marketing. Check back soon. If you haven’t signed up to receive our articles, do it now — you won’t want to miss out!

If you haven’t already entered into the microblogging world of Twitter, read my previous post for a how-to guide. Once you’ve got the service down, and you’re regularly Tweeting at least a few times a day, you should begin to see a decent stream of traffic to your website and be engaged in some discussions with others in your network.

Now it’s time to take it up a notch.

You’ve probably heard of a few Twitter applications at this point. HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Tweetr all provide a more user-friendly interface to Tweet from. Some have features like scheduling Tweets and being able to log into multiple accounts at once.

Here’s my list of the most useful applications that can help with your business networking.

1. Twitter Tools on WordPress
   

   If your company’s blog is hosted on WordPress, I highly recommend installing this plugin. Once installed, each time you publish a blog post, it’s automatically fed into your Twitter feed. You can also opt to not Tweet the post by unchecking a box at the bottom of your WP posting form.

2.  Tweet This
   Similar to Twitter Tools, this plug-in works with your WordPress blog. While Twitter Tools allows you to Tweet your blog post from the user interface, Tweet This lets your readers Tweet the post from their accounts, allowing for more dissemination of your blog posts and more exposure.
   
3. TweetStats
   

   Simply enter your Twitter username, and the application graphs your account information and trends. I learned that my highest Tweeting day is Thursday, and most of my Tweets hover around 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. It shows that 16% of my Tweets are @replies (which should probably be higher), and that I Tweeted 118 times in February compared with only 81 times in January.

   Why is this helpful? If you’re new to Twitter, like Bizmanualz is, it’s important to know where you’re lacking. Taking this information, I learned that I should probably throw out a few more Tweets midday-maybe I’ll reach a different audience. I should probably Tweet more Monday through Wednesday and reply to more friends’ posts. 

4. Twimailer
   

   Have you gotten into the habit of auto-following everyone who follows you? At first it seems like a good idea. You don’t have that many followers, and the more people you follow, the wider your network and reach will be. But … Bizmanualz publishes prewritten business policies and procedures-so why would we want to follow an Australian surfing blogger? At some point, your network will become diluted with people whose updates you don’t really read and who don’t read yours.

   When you sign up for Twimailer, instead of receiving the typical “so-and-so is now following you on Twitter,” you received a more detailed history, including their past 20 Tweets, number of followers and number of people who are following them. Then you can decide whether to follow them back.

5.  Twollow
   

   So I know I just said it was dangerous to auto-follow others. But there is a way to do so without diluting your conversation topics. Twollow lets you enter in specific keywords and choose to auto-follow anyone who Tweets those keywords. For example, I put in the word “Bizmanualz.” Twollow will automatically sign me up to follow anyone who is chatting about our company.

   You can also use this tool to follow the discussion on a list of keywords without actually auto-following. It’s a great substitute for search.twitter.com because you can see the results for many keyword groups at once, and Twollow saves your list of keywords.

Are there any applications you would add? Let us know!

All of our discussions about social networking as a lead generation strategy are great, but it begs the questions: Does it work? Can it convert into sales?

Lead generation is all about spending your time focusing on clients who are ready and willing to buy. That’s not really the case with a broad, shot-in-the-dark approach that many take with social networking. It takes time and effort to constantly update your social networks, and to what end?

On Twitter (plug: follow us @bizmanualz), it seems like you’re screaming your message in a giant chasm and hoping someone will hear you. Maybe you’ll drive someone to your website or blog. Maybe, if you’re very lucky, you’ll be “retweeted” by a fellow Tweeter with an expansive network.

On Facebook, it’s much the same. You can target certain people by searching out groups that apply to what you’re selling and inviting them to your fan page. But you really know nothing about your prospects other than maybe they have too much time on their hands.

But the problem is in the approach.

You can’t take the networking part out of social networking. If all you’re doing is pushing your product onto an unknown audience, they’ll quickly be turned off, or “un-friend” you (gasp!). But if you become part of the conversation and offer them something of value, whether it is your blog or simply pointing to an interesting article you read this morning, they’re much more likely trust you and participate.

Of course, as with face-to-face networking, social networking is as much about the relationship and conversation as it is about then leveraging that relationship into something positive for your company. No one wants to do business with an unknown. The more you get your brand out there and form trusting, mutually beneficial relationships, the better.

Social networks simplify and amplify that process. How is it working for you?

Blogging carries with it a history of introspection, with bloggers writing about what is going on in their lives and organizations. If your reason for blogging is to attract and engage customers, then your posts need the additional filter of relevance to customers.

Blogging about what you are working on any given day won’t necessarily attract more potential customers to your site. But tuning in to the value that customers see in your organization, and using the blog to provide thought, background and ideas related to that perceived value may interest current customers and even attract new ones.

Think of a business blog as a cousin to the personal blog, rather than as a twin. Like a personal blog, a business blog serves as a valuable outlet for personal expression. It helps connect bloggers to customers, providing a direct channel for communication helping to form strong relationships at all levels.  But first customers have to care about you are writing about.

So how do you know what customers care about?

Every business has customers. And the more you can involve your bloggers with customers, the more they can hear directly what is on customers’ minds, and then they can write about it.

Now, I am not recommending that you share a client’s specific concerns.  But you can certainly listen for the issues that clients want to address in meetings, and turn those around into blogging topics.

For example, my team and I were in a client meeting last week. The agenda focused on three topic areas: 1) the client’s sales pipeline activities and building a supportive sales culture; 2) processes for evaluating new opportunities and applying resources; 3) marketing messages and web site copy supporting sales for a couple of product lines. These topic areas translate quite nicely into blog post ideas that, by our customers’ attention and participation in the meeting, we can say would be relevant to them.

More specifically, here are a few blog-post ideas that derive from the agenda and discussion with our customer last week:

1. The Power of Narrative: Why case Studies Work for Technology Marketing
2. How We Test Your Value Proposition and Marketing Message
3. How We Write Effective Web Copy For Technology Companies
4. Writing Case Studies from Prior Employment
5. How Technology Companies Can Generate Leads With On-Line Articles
6. Giving Your Web Site a Job to do: Using Your Web Site as a Lead-Generation Engine
7. Using Google Groups to Coordinate Marketing Projects
8. Who in your Company Should sign off on Marketing Content
9. Make your trade show investment pay off: Set up meetings before you go
10. Getting Ready For Trade Shows: Typical Time Lines
11. When Engineering Companies Grow And Build Sales Cultures

Customers at the meeting leaned in, or sat up and focused on all these points over the course of a half-day working meeting.  Listening during meetings with customers can generate specific, relevant topics that simply reflecting on our own thoughts cannot.  Companies that want their blogging to be relevant and attractive for new customers should listen to what current customers are saying, and then follow through by writing about it on their blogs.

This also implies that your employees should blog about the aspects of their jobs that require interaction with customers. And when that is not possible, customer-facing employees should identify and share topic areas based on what they are hearing from customers.