The Docushop detailed sales & marketing department standard polices & procedures manual (SOP) can be customised for any business to guide your sales, marketing and admin staff to general & preferred sales and marketing practices in your business.
WHAT IS A SALES AND MARKETING SOP?
A Sales and Marketing Standard Operating Procedure or SOP is a detailed and robust guide or manual with all your company sales and marketing policies, processes, protocols and procedures. Businesses with a sales and marketing department, or that have tasks in sales and marketing use sales SOPs to ensure best practice is adopted when dealing with customers and attracting new leads.
WHY DO I NEED A SALES AND MARKETING SOP?
Any business with a sales function or that conducts marketing needs a clear guide for employees, contractors and any other staff to follow when undertaking particular tasks.
Sales can be a difficult task for many employees, especially new employees. Knowing exactly what to do and when is different for each business, and often the way you describe your products or services requires guidelines to ensure staff don't say the wrong thing, or worse misrepresent your product or service and what it doess (or doesn't do).
You may also have complex systems you use to track your leads, or to manage your marketing channels, these all require a detailed breakdown of how to utilise them so any new sales or marketing team member can hit the ground running when they start with your business.
The sales SOP can also be a useful tool for your internal staff helping out in the sales and/or marketing department if you have team members off sick or on annual leave.
WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THIS SALES AND MARKETING SOP?
The Docushop Sales and Marketing SOP is comprehensie and provides a guideline to keep all your general sales & marketing policies and procedures in one place. Can be used as part of an induction pack for new sales or marketing team members.
Some of the Policies & Procedures covered:
- Responding to Customers
- Customer Feedback
- Weekly Sales Meetings
- Sales Coverage
- Competitor Customer Awareness
- Sales Training & Development
- Prime Selling Time
- Lost Business / Lost Leads
- SalesForce/CRM Lead Tracking
- Managing External Sales
- Entertainment & Stockist Visits
- International Sales & Marketing
- Pricing
- Annual Business Plan & Quarterly Action Plan
- Advertising & Promotion
- Social Media Procedures
- Online Banner Ads
- Affiliate Marketing
- Email Marketing (EDMs)
- Key Account Management
- Media Policy
- Monthly Reporting
- And many more!
What is also useful with the Docushop sales SOP is that majority of the sections have sample data. Many of which can be adopted into your own business as best practice and can be amended to suit your individual policies and sales needs.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF HAVING A SALES AND MARKETING SOP?
By having all your sales & marketing policies and procedures in one place you make it easier for your staff to reference and stay on top of business best practice.
Clear guidelines help staff do their job within the limitations you set and to make sure they are doing the right thing. They are especially good for new hires and staff who may be assisting your team whilst someone is away on leave.
Some of the benefits are:
- Promote positive change within your business
- Produce reliable results by having everyone follow th same system with the same rules
- Improve employee training experience and reduce time in wasted training / asking repetitive questions
- Discover holes in your existing practices and plan a policy or procedure to combat them
- Standarise your customer experience
- Increase sales and marketing employee efficiency and productivity
- Reduce management time / costs when inducting new sales and marketing employees
- Reduce downtime when sales and marketing team members are unwell / on leave
WHAT HAPPENS IF I DON'T HAVE A SALES AND MARKETING SOP?
Not exclusive to sales and marketing departments, Standard Operating Procedure guides or manuals (often know as SOPs) are critical for almost any role or department in a business. Without them, you simply waste time in ineffective training practices, often yourself up to reputational risk when someone communicates something poorly or incorrectly and staff generally feel like their roll is not taken seriously.
Implementing an SOP for a department or a role when a business is young means you are starting with the right foundations. Trust us when we tell you, implementing an SOP in a mature team is difficult. You encounter pushback from people who are all likely doing things their own way (not in the best interest of the company). It requires a degree of change management in order to roll out effectively.
When you implement a sales or marketing SOP in fresh teams or roles, it also makes that person or department responsible for updating it, adding new tasks or processses and updating anything as it changes. If you fail to implement when your business is in its early stages your poor HR department or admin team get tasked with having to gather all the data and processes needed to create an SOP likely needing to extract that data from busy staff, who may not have the time needed to dedicate to a 'non-income producing task' (sales people have targets!!).
HOW TO USE THIS SALES AND MARKETING SOP?
The sales and marketing SOP emplate is an editable MS Word document and is ready to download and edit immediately.
Once purchased, wait a few moments while it creates your download, and you can then download when the ‘DOWNLOADS READY’ box appears. You will also receive an email with the downloads so you can access them later.
Customise the template with your business name and logo. You can also change the theme template to update the colour profile to match your corporate colours.
Read through every section and customise to your business. If something is not relevant, simply delete it. And of course, you can add any additional sections as you require.