Maximise the Efficiency of your Marketing Team

A strong sales and marketing team is an essential component of any business. And successful teams have one thing in common – they can share information quickly and reliably.

Here are some proven ways to help your sales and marketing support team to improve efficiencies and streamline their processes.

Calendar sharing for stress-free scheduling

An easy way to keep your team up to date with their co-workers’ movements is to use electronic scheduling tools and calendar sharing. It then becomes a simple process to arrange a meeting as you can see everyone’s availability at a given time and date.

Instead of having to phone or email multiple colleagues, you can schedule a meeting based on everyone’s accessibility according to their calendar. Both you and the other attendees can then drop the appointment into your schedule with no effort.

Scheduling tools allow you to accept, decline or reschedule appointments at the click of a mouse.

Use templates for consistency

A good way of ensuring uniformity in written materials within a department is to create templates. These can be used for sales & retention such as for quotes or to obtain customer feedback, and for regular marketing tasks such a content planners, event calendars and campaign monitoring. Once a basic template is set up it can then be customised to suit the tasks.

Templates ensure that your support team produces documents in the same style and include the same information. This consistency displays a professional image both internally and externally to clients.

It becomes a simple matter to customise your templates for different projects.

Create efficient workflows

By producing a workflow for each task, your sales and marketing support team knows what to do and when to do it. Workflows are a great way to streamline administrative processes and should list everything you need to do to complete a task or project.

They can be as detailed or simple as you like and it’s a good idea to ask your team for input when putting together a workflow. By talking through each step of a task, you may identify duplications of effort and be able to make your workflow move faster. It’s worth requesting input from anyone in the workflow chain.

You can reuse workflows again and again and they can be customised for new tasks or projects. Workflows can also be used to send items automatically, and remind you when a task is due.

Invest in new technologies

Data-based management systems such as EPR and CRM have changed the way businesses operate by freeing up vital time and resources.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions use business process management software to integrate an organisation’s applications – this helps them to automate many back office functions. Utilising automated admin systems can make your team faster and more efficient.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing and improving your organisation’s relationships and interactions with customers, suppliers and partners. The data gained from CRM systems provides valuable insights that can help your company to make more informed decisions.

The latest CRM and ERP solutions have enabled millions of businesses to streamline internal processes and increase their profitability.

Full Marketing Automation software will help streamline your marketing processes. Leading platforms such as Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and Hubspot are definitely worth considering. These automated platforms help businesses to take their marketing to the next level by managing and monitoring multiple cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Email marketing software such as Mailchimp, Vertical Response, Get Response, Benchmark Email and iContact will make email marketing campaigns a breeze and include features such as multiple list imports, branded templates, social media integration and reporting.

Banish old inefficiencies

It’s highly advantageous to get your team together on a regular basis and ask them where they think improvements could be made.

Changes to process can sometimes cause bottlenecks, or more crucially, vital information channels could be breaking down. By regularly reviewing your team’s activities you can avoid these pitfalls.

Finally, never be afraid of looking at new ways of working. Companies can end up paying a high price by persisting in old ways of doing things. Regularly assess the productivity and efficiency of your sales and marketing team and implement changes whenever necessary.

As a business grows, the need to stay ahead of the competition becomes more important and you may find that your team does not have the skills or experience in some more specialist areas.

If you are finding it a challenge to manage all elements of marketing your business online, Whizz Marketing can provide advice, guidance and regular marketing and SEO support. Please contact Louise at Whizz Marketing on 01252 622129 if you are interested to look at outsourcing some of your marketing tasks. We will be delighted to assist.