A sales and marketing consultant is a trained, qualified and a skilled professional that helps businesses grow locally, nationally and even internationally. They develop new sales and marketing strategies or make edits to existing ones with the aim of reaching right audience at the right time across various online and offline channels. With the help of goal setting, market research, time-tested marketing tactics, right messaging, analysis and measurement, they can help your business take a targeted approach and outperform your competitors.
You can hire sales and marketing consultants either on a monthly retainer, flat fee or on an hourly basis. Their charges usually depends upon their level of experience in the marketing consulting services they provide.
What does a B2B sales and marketing consultant do ?
A B2B sales and marketing consultant can help you achieve your sales, marketing and business outcomes. Depending upon how long they have been in the field and industry, they can provide relevant expertise you may need for expansion and customer base growth.
1.Sales and Marketing Planning - A consultant can help build a strategic sales and marketing plan that can lay a solid foundation for all your sales and marketing initiatives. This roadmap is an actionable plan containing short and long term SMART goals, sales and marketing strategies, tactics and KPIs for reporting and analysis purposes. With the help of a solid plan, you can successfully launch your business, products and services.
2. Digital Initiatives - Your business needs a digital marketing strategy to reach your enterprise customers. A sales and marketing consultant will help either build a new strategy or improve upon existing one to generate leads and convert them into profitable customers. With the help of digital tactics such as - website, content marketing, email marketing, paid ads and social media strategy, a consultant will help you build an online presence, increase your brand awareness, engage with your buyers, acquire and retain customers.
3. Stay competitive - Knowing who your competitors are and what their product and services offerings are is key to staying competitive in a crowded market space. If your product is an e-commerce platform, a competitive comparison performed by a sales and marketing consultant in terms of features, architecture, pricing etc. will help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats - components that are critical to developing your strategy to help you stand out in the eyes of your customers.
4. Positioning and Messaging - A sales and marketing consultant can help you come up with value propositions, positioning statement as well as clarify your messaging and place within your market. They can help you describe clearly - who your company is, what it does, why it exists, what your products and services are, what customer problems and challenges it solves and how they help your customer’s business.
5. Develop sales and marketing collaterals - Are your current collaterals effectively describing your business and products? Do you have all the right collaterals to educate and simplify decision-making for your buyers? Are you enabling your sales team by providing them the right information and tools? A sales and marketing consultant can help answer some of these questions. They can help you develop critical buyer-enablement pieces that you can use along various points in the customer journey to educate prospects and win more deals.
6. Shape your brand - A sales and marketing consultant can help you develop a clear, trustworthy, identifiable brand identity. They can help provide guidance on things such as your logo, tagline, brand colors and intangible elements such as core values, brand story, your mission and vision statements.
7. Publicity - Surpassed a major milestone? Had some leadership changes? Have a new product launch coming up? Getting acquired by a company? If your company is ready to create influence within your industry, a sales and marketing consultant can help you with public relations initiatives.
Whether you are looking to augment your current business efforts by hiring a sales and marketing consultant or just starting out and need expertise in knowing where to start, understanding why you need a sales and marketing consultant is very important. You can then move to the next step of identifying the right marketing consultant that meets those specific business requirements.
Demand for sales and marketing consultants is typically very high, so it's best to plan ahead.
