Small Business Blog

Marketing Tactics & Sales Tactics for Small Business Development

Marketing Tactics & Sales Tactics; two vital components of small business development and improvement. If you’re looking for increased sales, mainly through finding new customers, then selecting the best marketing & sales tactics for your business should be a priority for you and your team.

Tactics are what you actually do, they are the individual tactics implemented that are designed to deliver your overall strategy and reach your goals. I assume you know the difference between marketing & sales, so let us talk about the importance of proactive selection of tactics.

Importance of Proactive Selection of Marketing Tactics & Sales Tactics

Many small businesses do not proactively select the best marketing and sales tactics to achieve their goals. Unfortunately all too often business owners will choose marketing tactics simply because that is what has been promoted to them by another company with either advertising or services to sell. E.g. a local directory sales representative calls your business and convinces you to advertise, or a printer you know is doing a special deal on 30,000 color flyers this month, the ‘social media guru’ in your networking group convinces you to invest $1,000 with them to set up a facebook page because “you need to be on there”, etc, etc.

These examples could be opportunities, sure, but most of the time they are random not the best tactic to achieve the highest possible return on investment (ROI) from your limited marketing budget.

And what about sales tactics? Ok, so sales focused organisation like real estate agents are always looking for improvements in sales performance by tweaking individual sales tactics. But the vast majority of regular small businesses never or very rarely focus on proactively selecting sales tactics for business development and improvement. Most people are so afraid that they will be perceived as the pushy evil used car sales person that they are little more than an order taker…. Waiting until the customer buys rather than actually proactively understanding the sales process and decision making process and thus proactively selecting sales tactics that will both help the prospect and the business get a better result.

Be proactive, not reactive.

Going from Understanding Importance to Actually DOING

We want to take our understanding of the importance of proactive selection and implementation of tactics and turn that in real life DOING. The below article links were written with marketing in mind however, they also apply equally to sales;

• You’ll of course also need to know - How to Select Which Marketing Tactics to Use in Your Small Business, then
• You’ll need to know the key points to Get Your Small Business Marketing Plan Implemented, and
• You’ll need to focus like a laser on execution – How to Execute Your Marketing Plan Consistently Over Time.

Action Points

It’s simple; if you want to improve your results, be proactive. Don’t just turn up and hope for the world will magically deliver you these improved results. Wake up!

• Write a list of marketing tactics you NEED to implement to achieve your goals and based on which market segment you decided you are targeting,
• Write a list of sales tactics you’ll use to convert leads/enquiries into paying customers, don’t be an order taker… be helpful and proactive in solving other people’s problems,
• Simplify; cross out 80% of your listed tactics and focus 100% of your effort on the 20% that you generate the biggest results and implement over the next 30 days!