VI. The Sales Force and Marketing Implementation Oversight
How should a country translate its intangible assets into dollars and cents (or euros)?
Enter its Sales force and marketing intermediaries.
Even poor countries should allocate funds to train and maintain a skilled sales force and pay its wages, expenses, and perks. Salespeople are the human face of the country's promotion efforts. They tailor to individual listeners (potential customers) the message the country wishes to convey about itself, its advantages, and its prospects.
As their title implies, salespersons personalize the sales pitch and enliven the sales process. They are as indispensable in mass-attendance road shows and in retail marketing (e.g., of tourism packages) as they are in one-on-one meetings with important decision-makers and investors.
The country's sales force should be trained to make presentations, respond to queries and objections, close deals, and cope with account growth. Its work should be tightly integrated with other promotional efforts such as mass mailings, telemarketing, media releases, and direct offers. Sales personnel should work hand in hand with marketing intermediaries such as travel agents, financial firms, investment funds, and corporate buyers.
Marketing intermediaries are at least as crucial to the country's success as its sales force. They are trusted links to investors, tourists, businessmen, and other "clients". They constitute repositories of expertise as well as venues of communication, both formal and informal. Though usually decried by populist and ignorant politicians, their role in smoothing the workings of the marketplace is crucial. Countries should nurture and cultivate brokers and go-betweens.
A marketing expert - preferably a former salesperson with relevant experience in the field - should head the country's marketing implementation oversight board or committee. The Marketing Implementation Oversight Board should include representatives of the various state bureaucracies, the country's branding and advertising consultants and agents, its sales force - and collaborating marketing intermediaries.
Turn Your Customers Into a Sales Force For Your Product or ServiceNo matter how large or small your company is, you could benefit from more experts selling your product or service. Hiring and training an in-house sales force is much too expensive for many small businesses. Even larger firms that already have sizeable sales departments could use help finding prospects and turning them into paying customers. The easiest and cheapest way to build your sales force is to give customers a chance to promote your products and services. Satisfied customers not only know all about what you sell, but because they have tried your product themselves, they have more credibility wit ..
This body's task is to harmonize and coordinate the country's various efforts at branding, advertising, publicity, and promotion. It is the state's branding headquarters and should enjoy wide supervisory as well as executive powers.
In other words, marketing implementation is about ensuring that the country's message is both timely (synergetic) and coherent and, thus, both credible (consistent) and efficient. Scarce resources are better allocated and deployed if the left hand consults the right one before it moves.
But how can a country judge the efficacy of its attempts to brand or re-brand itself and, consequently, to attract customers?
Marketing Evaluation and Control are the topics of our next article.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Building A Sales Force That Pays For Itself The elements involved in building a sales force, especially one that pays for itself and also adds value to any business, are many and varied. The whole purpose and direction of a sales manager needs to be directed to creating a sales force that causes the employing company to expand through increasing sales. This is done by the following general steps: Training sales staff to be able to sell the company product in large volume; correcting how sales presentations are made; handling any customer flaps his sales people make; and then testing and hiring more sales people, to create an ever increa ..
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, Global Politician, PopMatters, and eBookWeb , and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He is the the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
