This week I had the pleasure of hearing Sean Licata from VIZIYA Corp talk about sales and marketing strategy. The talk is part of the monthly Innovation Factory Sales Peer2Peer that I help to champion.
I met Sean as we started VA Partners. He was active in the start-up space in Hamilton and so were we. Sean gave a great talk on the sales and marketing strategy journey for himself as well as the VIZIYA leadership and sales and marketing teams. Here are a few of my top take-aways from the session.
Employees Over Customers: Team is Important
Some people will argue that your customers are the most important thing to your business, but Sean believes that employees are more important, which I agree with. Your employees help deliver your products and services to your customers. The more productive, successful, and happy your employees are, the better the experience is for your customer. Sean has even sacrificed rude customers before in order to support his team.
No Silver Bullet
There isn’t one silver bullet that works all the time. It often takes multiple tactics to close clients including inbound, outbound, trade shows, social media, paid ads, and content marketing.
Targeted Approach
For VIZIYA, they have a very defined target customer: they need to be a certain size, in a specific industry, and use a certain software for their solution to be a fit. This means there is a finite target list. The goal is to figure out ways to market and sell to those specific organizations. Back in my early sales days we called this enterprise sales, but now it’s called account based sales and marketing.
What’s The Next Thing?
Sean is always looking for that next thing to work on. In some cases it may be something new to his team like LinkedIn Ads, and in other cases it is adding new sales and marketing automation tools. Always look for that next thing that can help drive more sales and a better ROI.
Add Process Quietly
Sean believes in process to help drive large sales increases without having to add the same percentage of cost or head count. He says he likes to sneak in process over time so they can keep an eye on the future, while still driving short-term goals.
Measure and Track
Over the last nine plus years at VIZIYA Sean has been tracking his metrics. He has an excellent idea on how many opportunities he needs in the funnel and how many will result in sales. There are also goals associated with the sales and marketing activities for the teams on what may lead to those opportunities. He can then get a more accurate funnel as well as understanding the activities and tactics that are most efficient.
VA Partners has worked with almost 150 startups and growing businesses since our founding. If you want to talk about your Sales and Marketing Strategy please reach out.
