SALES & MARKETING
2025
Synchronize Your Sales and Marketing System for 2021 Controlled Growth
2023
2024
2022
By Mark Phelps, Synchronous Solutions
Many fabricators in the surfacing industry have had
Synchronous Flow is about designing the sales and marketing
tremendous success using Synchronous Flow to improve their
process that allows you to regulate the flow of leads and manage
businesses from a production standpoint: reducing lead times,
how effective the process is at achieving the company goals. The
improving first-time quality and more. But can you apply
first step is to know the limits of the process. How many people
Synchronous Flow to the marketing and sales side of your
can say, “Hey, I’m interested,” before the process breaks down? If
business? The answer is yes!
one person says they’re interested, OK, no problem. If 100 people
Synchronous Flow is the science of improving flow as it relates to information or material. Flow problems exist in all areas of your life. You experience these problems whether you are dealing with rush hour traffic, waiting in queue at your local DMV, or trying to pay your bills and needing a check to clear. The big challenge is trying to accomplish all you set out to get done with limited time and availability. Synchronous Flow brings an array of procedures, policies, tools and techniques to transform the business process from a chaotic, reactive, out-ofcontrol process into a disciplined, proactive and fully-in-control business system. If you’re familiar with Synchronous Flow as it applies to production, then you will see the same concepts applied to sales and marketing. Perfecting Flow in Sales and Marketing In sales and marketing, the focus is on the flow of information and people — customers. In this case, leads, prospects, and customers are your raw materials and the communication that occurs between them and your company representatives is the information. When you run a marketing campaign, your goal is to
say they’re interested in a single day, could you handle all those leads with your current process and staff? It’s crucial to understand: What is the limiting resource? How much is too much for our receptionist to handle? How much is too much for our sales team to handle? What is the constraint to processing new leads and producing quotes effectively? If you overload the production system, it will go into chaos; the same thing will happen if you overload a sales and marketing system. How do you measure success? One way is to look at quotes. You can see how many leads are coming in, so you should be able to track those quotes and follow-ups. If you see a bottleneck, identify the constraint: • What is the capacity of the team? • What would enable the team to do more? • What are some limits in the process? With these insights, you can start to (re)define the process from that point forward. The goal is to improve your process continuously. Your marketing system should get better and better. Every dollar spent on marketing should result in more quotes. Every
generate leads. When a lead comes in, you want to ensure they
team member in marketing should be able to handle more
are nurtured as quickly as possible. It’s essential to build a process
demand from the market.
and train your staff to be effective at it. Maybe you have someone
An important thing to understand is what’s constraining your
who answers the call promptly, or you have an email inbox that
ability to respond appropriately to incoming calls. If someone
gets monitored. The marketing process is about getting in front
inquires about a quote on a countertop project and you don’t
of people in your target market and engaging with them in a way
respond to them in an hour or two, chances are they’ve already
that makes them want to do business with you.
called someone else, and you may have lost that lead. You need
16 • Vol. 17 / Issue 3 • International Surface Fabricators Association