Achieving Sales Success & New Business in a Shrinking Industry

In 1933 my grandparents, Armand and Virginia Govin, founded MarkMaster as a rubber-stamp manufacturing company in Tampa, Florida. While stamps are still a big business for us (we make upwards of 10,000 to 12,000 stamps a day), we’ve since evolved into one of the largest custom-marking companies in the world with a basic product line of custom banners, signs, and name badges.

My brother Mark and I still value the same prospecting tools that our grandparents used – trade shows, networking, and referrals. At the same time, growing new business and achieving sales success in a shrinking industry is tough, particularly when marketing and IT resources are limited. Still, we’ve managed to pull off some significant growth, even during the economic downturn. Here are the three keys to our success.

  1. Streamline. The biggest barrier to our sales is that most prospects and customers dread the process of ordering our products. Managing layouts, text choices, and art placement can be a frustrating experience. We launched an initiative to redesign our new ordering platforms to make the process as easy for the customer as possible, while still giving them plenty of options. We also decided to add features behind the scenes to make our systems interface with other retailers online that sell our products.
  2. Innovate. While our product line continues to grow (in the next few months, we’ll be adding high-end items to our recognition line, including embedded and engraved crystal awards) there’s no escaping the fact that we’re living in a digital age. I even pay my own bills online instead of using stamps. To keep pace with today’s customer, we’ve begun to create collections that we’ve named the Impress Line. The first collection focuses on tradeshows and events. Now our customers will have a single-source manufacturer who will handle it all, from floor to ceiling. Not only will this make the process a less-stressful one, it will also mean a great deal of savings.
  3. Embrace Technology. We have a small sales team: three reps, a CSO, and a National Sales Manager. Thanks to our decision to establish an online sales channel, we’ve managed to see a huge return on our collective efforts. Using Ariba Discovery, we’re able to deliver speedy, reliable products to our existing clients and generate qualified leads for new business. As a result, we’ve created a robust, online sales channel and expanded our base of new customers by 65 percent and grow our overall business 20 percent year-over-year. We sell to 60 Fortune 500 companies, and we do almost all of it do through Ariba Discovery. The best way I can describe the service is like a Yellow Pages directory on steroids. We’re now so intertwined with this technology that it’s impossible to think of finding prospects without it.

In fact, Ariba Discovery recently helped our company land a deal with a large bank that had not considered us before due to our small size. We now service nine of the top 10 banks and eight of the top 10 insurance companies in the U.S. These are still important industry focuses for us, but we’re also seeing a turn toward retail, as our product mix has been moving toward signs and marketing items instead of strictly stamps.

Like any good company, we want to provide value to our current clients and find new ways to reach prospects. The traditional sales team is finding new ways to accomplish both of these goals. Sales teams today are more flexible, adaptive, and creative. They’re driven by collaboration and social business. Our business is no exception. By embracing new technology, our family business has managed to navigate around some pretty significant challenges, see significant growth, and achieve sales success, even during the economic downturn.

Now is a great time to invest in new technologies and new ideas. As a minority-owned company in the United States, it feels good that we’re able to offer products that are made right here. We’re not only investing in our company, we’re investing in the future of our families and the families of our employees – many of whom have been with us for decades. That means everything to us.

Kevin Govin
Kevin Govin is CEO of MarkMaster Inc.

Sales Leadership Advice for Aligning Marketing & Sales

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders, which will appear in my next book. This is an excerpt from my interview with Mark Burton, former VP of sales at MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems), where he was responsible for growing and managing MySQL AB’s entire international corporate sales force, indirect channels and partnership alliances. He has been involved in enterprise-level sales leadership for 30 years. 

Anneke: What were your “failures,” or things that didn’t go as well as they could have? What would you tell another executive about what not to do, or what to learn from your past experiences?

Mark: Failures: We’ve had lots of them. Processes and systems are so important. It took us a long time to work with a team to figure out everything we really needed to manage this environment. Marketing tends to be more positioning- and messaging-oriented, and more about just putting it out there. That whole idea of what a qualified lead is, and having something that ends up in the hands of sales that they want to deal with — it’s a big chasm between those two functions.

Get a very objective and measurable set of definitions, processes and systems to do some system-oriented scoring, and then have a very clear and written description for what becomes a sales lead. Get the marketing organization on board with forecasting and measurement of conversion rates, and make sure this is an activity that is worked monthly to continually pursue conversion rates that drive the company to profitability. This is a big change for most marketing and sales organizations. I wouldn’t call it a failure, but I will say it takes a long time to make sure everyone understands this end-to-end process, and what is involved in managing and measuring it. That was hard work with a lot of iterations and false starts.

Anneke: I see that changing rapidly, though, in many Sales 2.0 companies, where success depends on marketing and sales being aligned and collaborating. Do you see that working? How are companies bringing sales and marketing closer together?

Mark: It’s still a challenge for many companies. One of the first thoughts is, “Great, we’ll just give sales and marketing to the same person.” It’s unusual to have any one person who really understands sales and marketing well enough to add value across both functions through the Demand-to-Close process. There also aren’t many CEOs who really understand it. I would say this is still developing. My suggestion is to get advice from others who have successfully implemented the new model. This can be accomplished through a combination of outside consulting and benchmarking with companies that have successfully implemented such models.

Read the full interview with Mark Burton.

Anneke Seley
Anneke Seley is CEO and Founder of Phone Works and author of Sales 2.0. This post appeared originally on her blog.

What True Sales & Marketing Alignment Looks Like (Part I)

For many sales and marketing leaders, there is still work to be done when it comes to improving the relationship between their teams. Recently, my company, BigMachines, released a 2011 Benchmark Survey on the state of the sales industry, featuring responses from 100 sales executives. The aim of the survey was to uncover the biggest pain points affecting their jobs today. The top result? Two-thirds of respondents said that the biggest pain point is the disconnect between sales and marketing.

This is troubling to hear because when the lines of communication are broken, opportunities might be missed, errors can occur, and deals can even be lost. I’m fortunate to work for a company that takes the relationship between marketing and sales seriously and highly values collaboration. Here’s a portrait of how sales and marketing work for us:

My marketing team is an integral part of the sales process. We work closely with both inside and outside sales teams to provide the right messages to prospects and customers at the right times. We also provide them with an ongoing stream of sales leads and help them prioritize those leads based on demographics and interest levels.

Sales knows that marketing is here to help them meet their sales targets. We provide the intelligence and expertise to help them win. Our job is to build the supporting infrastructure to deliver selling messages via the most effective channels, and then monitor the results.

Our goals are aligned and we work (and play) as a team. Month after month, members of our sales team nominate members of my marketing team for “Star of the Month” awards. Sales thinks we rock (and we do)!

Have you implemented strategies within your organization that help sales and marketing work better together?

Will Wieglar

Will Wiegler is Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. Follow BigMachines on Twitter @BigMachines

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