Total Marketing Solutions

I delivered a 1-day workshop on implementing a Key Account approach to sales for one of our most important clients earlier this week and I was struck by just how essential it is for sales and marketing to be joined at the hip if this strategic approach to sales development is to be fully effective.

Now this shouldn’t be a revelation and by and large it wasn’t to the participants on the workshop, who were all very experienced and high quality sales professionals, but as we progressed through the day it became clear that it can be easy for sales people - even experienced ones - to drop into a silo mentality and not really see the need for a truly symbiotic relationship with their marketing colleagues when faced with the challenge of winning and development those key accounts that are the key to driving growth in both revenues and profitability.

These key accounts need to be treated as ‘markets of one’ with an individual sales AND marketing plans developed and implemented if their potential is to be fully realised. We had everybody on board with this way of thinking by the end of the workshop but it wasn’t completely plain sailing!