Business Insights

Marketing and sales alignment is all about creating a seamless customer journey that guides prospects through each stage of the marketing and sales funnel. It may sound simple enough, but this can be deceptively hard to pull off.  Getting it right requires a carefully planned approach for the top, middle and bottom of your funnel. As well as knowing how you’re going to move prospects from one stage to the next. Perhaps most challenging of all, it requires sales and marketing to work closely together and be completely aligned.

Businesses with properly aligned sales and marketing teams sell far more often at a higher profit margin. When our part-time Marketing Directors arrive in a new business, they’re often asked for marketing strategies to increase sales. As they look into improving the sales process, though, they actually find that the relationship between sales and marketing isn’t as it should be.

For as long as there have been markets, there has been a thing called “market research.” The Phoenicians - a civilisation in the Middle East, established four and a half thousand years ago - studied consumer demand for their exports, and became the trading powerhouse of the classical world. Marco Polo’s diaries talk about the trade studies he conducted for Kublai Khan. Despite this long history of success, a lot of businesses still don’t fully understand the markets they operate within, or the people they’re trying to reach. That’s why we’re going to walk you through what market research is, what good it does for a business, when’s the right time to do it, and how to do it well.

For business owners, “Brexit means Brexit” means one thing: uncertainty.  With all economic indicators pointing towards a recession, the question isn’t so much ‘if’ the downturn will hit, or even ‘when’. It’s ‘how’ businesses will manage to survive it. Responsible business owners should now be busy making plans to weather the storm.

How much is your business worth? Ask this question to ten business leaders, and nine of them will focus on the bottom line - turnover, profit, revenue. Important factors, no doubt, but value runs deeper than the financials. Business value is generally calculated as Net profit of business times Multiple of earnings for the sector. This series is concerned with those multiples; those variable elements of a business that can add considerable value when it comes to the time to sell. In this series so far we’ve covered benchmarking, and the importance of a good employer brand. In this piece, we’re focusing on new product development.