Business Fortune
Sales Maven, under the innovative leadership of CEO Lisa Canning, offers consulting services in sales and marketing to small American businesses with under 20 workers who have one or more defined niches and need an affordable sales and marketing strategy. The team integrates people, procedures, and sales and marketing initiatives to generate steady revenue in six to twelve months at an affordable expense, enabling owners to grow, step down, or get a better night's sleep. The services provided by the organization combine traditional sales support with digital marketing. With more than 100 professionals on staff, the company offers a wide range of services, including SEO, video, webinars, written and social content planning and creation, email marketing, cold list building, internal and outside sales support, sales script authoring, video letters, and management.
3.5-year-old Sales Maven was made possible by Lisa Canning's personal experiences as a 40-year-old small business entrepreneur. A US startup providing marketing and sales services to small businesses under $10 million in revenue is called Sales Maven. Sales Maven, who has brought small businesses up to $10 million in scale, helped Lisa's Clarinet Shop, her over $1 million music business, do more than just weather the pandemic. In response to COVID-19, which caused an average revenue reduction of 50–75 percent, Sales Maven created a sales and marketing plan to expand a new line of musical instruments that Canning recognized as a business opportunity.
Sales Maven used customer insight and research to construct a compelling sales and marketing plan based on the customers' personas they had established. They started by auditing their present marketing messaging, sales strategies, customer pain areas, and key marketing messages. During one of the worst periods in the history of the music industry, she built her budding brand, GetSeriO, into five sales figures with the help of her Sales Maven team.
Sales Maven: Solving the Right Problems
Even for less skilled founders, creating a lean, effective, and cohesive marketing and sales plan can be challenging. While some small businesses might have the funds to hire more people for marketing and sales, the majority lack the knowledge, resources, or staff to plan, test, manage, and carry out all the components of a sales and marketing strategy that are required to achieve repeatable, scalable success.
Many, according to Canning, resist. "Most small businesses under $10 million in revenue are still working to expand their offerings of products and services," Lisa explains. Because of this, even if creating effective teams and plans for sales and marketing is essential to their survival, they don't devote enough time or effort to doing so. This is particularly true in cases where a product gains popularity quickly and appears to have a life of its own."
Sometimes early, quick recurring sales lead CEOs to take a backseat rather than actively developing their marketing and sales teams. They mistakenly believe it will expand in a coherent, sustainable manner and, as a result, demand less of their management effort. When a creator concentrates on enhancing the caliber, effectiveness, or worth of their group, offering, or service—which is ultimately essential to the company's long-term top and bottom line growth—it is simple to assume this. And Sales Maven steps in just at this point.
Blue Ocean Strategy of Sales Maven
Upon investigating external marketing and sales support organizations, Mrs. Canning discovered a very dispersed range of service offers from numerous businesses. "Most approach their prospects like vendors peddling goods with a subscription level plan and rigid delivery, which was far from the integrated service delivery—workflow—I wanted our clients to experience or the partner mentality I was looking for," Lisa says.
Canning's own experiences and her work assisting others had taught her that small business owners required professional guidance and skillful storytelling in order to produce effective and engaging content and marketing that would help them more readily advance to the next level. The workplaces of small enterprises are frequently extremely disorganized. It was crucial to assist them in developing a system that streamlines their marketing and sales operations in a predictable manner.
In order to solve this problem, Sales Maven looked at mid-tier agencies and developed a combination of high-end consulting and reasonably priced service offerings. These currently consist of: digital advertising campaigns, SEO strategy and implementation, graphic design, content and website development, video & branding services, social media engagement, CRM & customer service management, marketing and sales strategy, and research and list building services.
Sales Most of Maven's employees are part-time workers from all over the world. This lowers its labor and benefit costs, but it also gives its employees the financial stability they need to follow their passions and desires for personal development. This is by design. Out of a staff of about 100, a large number of stay-at-home mothers seem to be a winning strategy.
The fflow Collaboration
Early on, Sales Maven made an investment in a collaboration with UK software developer Sarah Eggleston, anticipating their future expansion. Sales Maven encountered significant enterprise issues related to communication and collaboration more quickly than most agencies because their teams are geographically dispersed. This allowed them to tackle the whole-organization problem more forcefully and quickly than most agencies.
Their mutual realization that they are entering a world where many business technology issues have been resolved from a technological standpoint is what drew Canning and Eggleston together. However, they are just starting to build them using behavioral science. Current software almost usually aims to address a particular issue for a single team; time tracking software is designed for contributing consultants, while invoicing software is designed for the finance team.
However, the operations team and consumers want to see how an invoice fits the work completed, whereas finance is more concerned with the project and the invoice. The innovation behind the fflow solution is the creation of a reliable system that significantly enhances team communication with both customers and other internal teams.
"fflow wants to create a solution that is easy to use for an entire company. We're attempting to achieve a balance by doing as few things as possible, which is why we're also moving in the direction of integrating with current tools. It also sets us apart from enterprise software, which may only offer a single software subscription but lumps together a number of distinct solutions. Nevertheless, cooperation is an afterthought that often manifests itself in the user experience, as developer Eggleston pointed out. The fundamental design is still focused on resolving a single issue for each team.
Leadership | Sales Maven
Lisa Canning, the CEO, has experience in the business world. She started her first little business at the age of 17, and since then, she has developed numerous profitable companies and assisted many others in developing their ideas into profitable endeavors. Growing up in a family of small business entrepreneurs and having professional music training, Lisa has over 30 years of expertise in customer acquisition, sales, and business planning.
