Why Your Advertising Strategy Needs a Sales Voice

The Hatfields and the McCoys. The Yankees and the Red Sox. DC and Marvel. Sales and Marketing.

Often seen as competing silos with opposing objectives, an effective foodservice growth strategy requires sales and marketing to work in lockstep as partners – not rivals. Our most successful foodservice campaigns have been championed by client teams made up of marketing and sales leaders. For some companies, that might be the same person wearing two hats. Nevertheless, the unique goals, perspectives, and skillsets of the sales and marketing functions must be considered in unison.

And now the questions come racing in: What does that look like in practice? How do we bridge the gap?

In fact, asking the right questions becomes the answer itself.

Leverage insights from both teams to ask and answer key questions along the way when planning and activating an integrated foodservice marketing strategy.

Ask and answer these questions – together.

Create common goals, priorities, and KPIs:

• What does success look like?
• In what segments are we easily winning without the need for paid support?
• In what segments do we need paid marketing support to fill in the gaps?
• How will it all be measured?

Set investment levels based on realistic ROI potential:

• What is the average annual value of a new customer?
• How many new customers will we need to meet corporate revenue goals?
• What’s a realistic close rate on new leads?
• How many qualified leads and new accounts can our team effectively service?

Ground creative work in true foodservice customer insights:

• How are most of our customers using the product?
• What does trend data indicate about viable applications and use cases?
• What do their kitchens look like?
• Do our chef customers ever wear that kind of hat or apron?

Define what a quality lead looks like and act accordingly:

• Do they need to have a distributor?
• Do we need to know usage volume of similar products?
• How many questions can we ask before scaring off the lead?
• Can we offer and fulfill samples for qualified leads?

Extend the campaign to hard-working sales tools:

• At what touchpoints are we interacting most with customers and prospects?
• What questions does our material need to answer for the operator?
• How are our customers consuming content? Print, digital, text message, etc.
• What do we need to educate and inspire our broker and distributor teams?

Commit to providing regular qualitative and quantitative feedback in-market:

• How many leads have we generated?
• What percentage of those leads have been qualified?
• What big wins have we seen as a result of the campaign?
• What are customers and prospects saying about our ads and collateral?

As they say, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.