Many companies and marketing agencies talk about the importance of aligning your sales and marketing activities.
This is important as by ensuring these two key business disciplines are working in harmony, marketing campaigns will be more effective resulting in the better us of resources to drive growth.
But is this enough?
By aligning just these two disciplines are you not just focussing on increasing the number of your customers to grow your business? Which in itself will lead to the need for more resources and ‘growth pain’. And is this sustainable?
When you actually sit down and think about it there are in fact three ways you can grow and sustain any business:
- Increase the number of your customers.
- Increase their transaction value.
- Increase their frequency of purchase.
Which is why we talk about Three Dimensional Sustainability & Growth.
What this means is your business invests time and resources in not just generating new sales leads and acquisition, but also on delighting and retaining existing customers.
When you have happy customers you have a greater opportunity to increase transaction value and the frequency of purchase and this can lead to truly exponential growth and usually with the fraction of resources required.
And when you consider that it can cost five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, then the retention of your existing customers comes into even sharper focus as a way to achieve accelerated growth and sustainability.
But this requires the involvement of the whole business as every job role, either directly or indirectly, needs to relate to getting and keeping customers. How is your product or service is delivered? How does your finance team bill and collect? How does your customer service team look after your customers? How do you add further value? And so much more.
In fact when you think about it every person in your business, through direct or indirect interactions, will create perceptions and lasting impressions that will directly influence your ability to identify, attract, acquire and retain customers.
So the alignment of just sales and marketing does not go far enough.
What you need to ensure is that all your departments and business functions are aligned, but what does this look like?
Alignment of all functions across your business is a subject we could spend hours on.
But a great starting point is involving a cross section of people across your business when developing strategy, goals and processes to ensure shared buy-in. It involves strong internal communications.
But most importantly it involves the development of shared values, in which everyone should be involved, that guide all priorities, actions and behaviour.
Some refer to this as developing a ‘customer centric culture’. We just think it makes good business sense.