Sales and Marketing Strategy: What's New?

New information is an essential part of your sales and marketing strategy. What new information are you looking for? You should be looking for new information: to improve your own marketing and sales skills, about your product or service, about what’s going on in the world, and information about what is going on with who. Your new sales and marketing strategies can be found in the “what’s new” that you know about. n nIf you want your sales and marketing strategies to get results you need to make a commitment to continual learning. Don’t associate this learning with the learning you did in school. This is real world learning. This is the kind of learning you can turn into dollars and cents. You should be learning something new each day to improve your marketing and sales skills. If you aren’t willing to invest in yourself you can’t hope to be a top producer. Plus you can never know everything no matter how long you’ve been in business. You’ll find that even when you re-read things you found value in before, you will find new value that is more pertinent for you today than it was the first time you saw it or heard it. nnNew is a time proven sales and marketing strategy. What is new about your product or service, or what can you make new about your product or service? Can you find a new use or perhaps a new target market? Can your product or service fulfill the wants for a new target market if you just change your packaging and message a little bit? For example, most people are time stressed and have time management issues in today’s world. If you sell a day planning system there isn’t anything all that exciting about that. After all there are lots of day planning systems, so you’re just one choice among many. But if you sell a day planning system for architects and engineers you now go from being a mundane product with about the same appeal as your competition, to holding a very special position in the market place with a special group of people to market to. nnLook outside your cave once in a while and find the opportunities to enhance your sales and marketing strategies. What’s going on in the news, and how can you tie it to your product or service and increase your sales. What are people talking about, what are they worried about, what’s the topic of the day? Can you somehow solve that problem with your solution? Look at the people who decided to package water in single serving bottles that cost as much as a soda. Who would have thought consumers would be willing to buy water? Now those same water folks are packaging their water in “green” containers. Another example of taking today’s issues and turning those issues into your sales and marketing strategy. Where’s your opportunity?n nnRiding on the coat tails of fame could be a sales and marketing strategy for your product or service. Who’s new or who’s big in your market place? Could they provide an endorsement or testimonial? If you use someone famous in your sales and marketing strategy as an attention getter, make sure they are someone your potential prospects know and respect. Being generally famous holds far less value and credibility than being famous in a way that relates. Using our example, an endorsement from Al Gore who’s known for his support of environmental issues would gain more credibility than using Bill Cosby just because he happens to be generally known and well liked. n