Improving Sales

What do we do?

We deliver short, sharp sales improvement programmes that have a disproportionate and long-lasting effect (50% - 100%) on profitability.

How do we do it?

Market Shape’s solution is simple and practical.

We combine a top class interim Marketing Director (possibly on a part-time basis) who is used to rolling up his sleeves to not only create an innovative solution, but also deliver it using a wide variety of marketing resources that are usually only found in much larger companies.

We provide business and market analysis, research, business development programmes, the marketing resources and the man that puts all of the components together to deliver the solution – increased, profitable sales.

When its completed, you can say goodbye to your ‘mentor’ and expand the new system with no extra staff, where you simply pay for whatever outsourced marketing resources you use.

Our solution has six different stages:

	Understanding your business
	Use big company analytics to identify the areas of best opportunity
	Create a practical plan
	Test the components
	Deliver the working model back to the existing management and transfer knowledge
	Retire as quickly as possible, but be available for monthly mentoring

We don’t just create a plan, we develop it from within your business and then pass it back to you

What techniques do we use?

The same approaches tried and tested by companies 100 times larger

Because this is a complete profitability improvement solution, the techniques will vary from client to client.

Generally, we use a variety of blue-chip research and analysis techniques that help us to understand where and how the top 20% or 30% of your business is coming from, the causes of your current profitability, and the barriers holding it back from improvement.

As a result, we will need to identify what makes your customers buy from you, which sub-markets find your proposition most attractive, which sub-markets provide you with the best type of business and overlay all of that with an understanding of how your competition threatens you in the same sub-markets, and where the future niche, high-growth opportunities are.

When we have all of this information in a reliable and consistent format, our experts will create the Improvement Plan, and then we will set about delivering the plan to achieve results.

What makes this approach special?

Offering talented management, top class analytical techniques and effective marketing resources as a single package, to achieve a specific, spectacular improvement.

1.	To make a radical improvement to your turnover, you need a specialist expert for a short time, not a full time manager to ‘look after things’. You need an Interim rather than a Consultant, because our approach is about managing an improvement as part of your team, not just designing one.
2.	But having a great manager alone is not enough, you need a marketing factory’ that can deliver the tools and solutions used by much larger companies, but on a cost-effective, outsource basis.
3.	It’s a package targeted at small companies that want to grow a successful business quickly, but don’t have the specialist expertise or resources to make the jump.
4.	We are specialists that only create ‘sales improvement programmes’. So we wont try and change your whole business, just its ability to make more profit - quickly and cost effectively from sales development.
5.	We use the sales and marketing techniques commonly used by much larger companies, aiming to improve your turnover by at least 50%, and your corresponding net profitability by more than that.

We aim to deliver a result – not just advice

Unique Sales Proposition

What makes this new approach different?

We use Interim Managers (rather than consultants) to manage the delivery of your step change project, so they don’t just create an elegant strategy, and then leave you to try and implement it. They stay around and manage the improvement process until its completed.

Their objective is to identify the best opportunities for improving sales, create the action plan, and then use our outsource resources to test each approach, and when the pilots are successful, to step back and hand over the ‘button pushing’ to the internal management team.

It’s not rocket science, its just never been done with small companies before.

Our aim is to deliver this increase in sales value without you hiring a full-time, highly skilled Marketing Manager, who has a track record of working for a much larger companies, when you only need them for a short period of time to create a Step Change.

It rarely needs to be a full-time engagement, so it’s also a less costly approach.

Who do we compete with?

We’re not sure

The closest we can think of is the multitude of consultants that have no marketing resources other than their own experience, that sell advice instead of results.

By comparison, our business employs all of the resources necessary to create and deliver a complete sales improvement solution, on a pay as you need it basis.

We think it’s the perfect solution. Using top class professionals that can create and deliver a substantial solution, but only pay for the small amount of time it takes to take advantage of their expertise.

Why pay for a relatively inexperienced, young Marketing Manager as a full-time position, when what you really need to create a Step Change, is a much more experienced Full Service team for 3-4 months.

After the solution is in place and proven, you don’t need them anymore. You just take over the process, confident that you have the-new-found-skills to continue to build on success.

Our whole approach is directed towards creating a significant increase in sales performance over a short period of time that can be managed on an ongoing basis by the original management team.

How much does it cost?

An initial discussion is free.

You will get an opportunity to see if we seem to know what we're talking about.

We will be able to decide whether we can help, and come up with an outline estimate of costs and potential results.

We understand that there needs to be a balance between the substantial improvements in profitable sales that can be achieved, and the fact that there probably isn’t a dedicated sales and marketing budget for this type of initiative.

Because each company is different, the type of solution that is necessary will vary, and so will our proposal.

As a broad rule of thumb however, we have found that all of the activity necessary to set-up and deliver our profit improvement programme on an ongoing basis usually costs between 2% and 5% of turnover as a one-off cost, spread over a 6 - 9 month period. Our result will be to improve your profitable sales by at least 50%.

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