One-size-fits-all digital marketing agency creating and amplifying your market growth: Sales Maven

“Sales Maven seeks to create a cohesive, stable environment for sales and marketing to flourish within their clients’ organizations. Their goal is to create a state of flow.”

Led by the visionary leader Lisa Canning (CEO), Sales Maven provides sales and marketing-consulting services to small firms in the United States with less than 20 employees with one or more established niches and require cost-effective sales and marketing plan. The team combines people, processes, and sales and marketing activities to produce predictable income in 6-12 months at a low cost, allowing owners to scale, exit, or sleep better at night. The company’s service offerings blend digital marketing and traditional sales support. SEO, video, webinars, written and social content strategy and development, email marketing, cold list building, inside and outside sales support, sales script writing, video letters, and management services are all available with its staff of over 100 experts.

Lisa Canning’s own experiences as a small business owner of 40 years paved the way for 3.5-year-old Sales Maven to be born. Sales Maven is a marketing and sales startup serving small businesses with revenues under 10M in the US. Having built small businesses up to 10M in size, it was Sales Maven that helped her over-one-million music business, Lisa’s Clarinet Shop, do more than survive the pandemic. With a 50-75 percent average decline in revenue due to COVID-19, Sales Maven developed a sales and marketing strategy to grow a new line of musical instruments Canning saw as an opportunity. Beginning with an audit of their current marketing messages, sales tactics, customer pain points, and existing key marketing messages, Sales Maven used what they learned through customer insight and research to develop a compelling sales and marketing strategy from the buyers’ personas created. Thanks to her Sales Maven team, she grew her fledgling brand, GetSeriO, into five sales figures during one of the hardest times in the history of the music business.

Synopsis | Sales Maven

Sales Maven – Solving the Right Problems

It’s hard for an agile founder, let alone those less adept, to develop a lean, efficient, aligned marketing and sales strategy. While some small businesses may have enough financial resources to staff up marketing and sales internally, most don’t have enough expertise or allocate enough bandwidth, investment, or staff to organize, test, manage and execute all the necessary facets of a sales and marketing plan to find repeatable, scalable success. And many resist, says Canning. Lisa says, “Most small businesses under 10M in revenue are still working to develop their product and service offerings further. As a result, they don’t focus enough of their time and energy on developing well-executed sales and marketing plans and teams, despite the life-sustaining significance of both. This is especially true when the product catches on quickly and seems to have an initial life of its own.”

Early quick reoccurring sales sometimes cause founders to sit back instead of proactively building their marketing and sales teams. They make the false assumption it will continue to grow in a cohesive, sustainable way and will require less of their attention to managing as a result. It’s an easy assumption to make when a founder focuses on improving the quality, efficiency, or value of their team, product, or service that is ultimately core to the long-term top and bottom-line growth. And this is exactly where Sales Maven comes in. 

Sales Maven’s Blue Ocean Strategy

When Mrs. Canning started looking around at outside marketing and sales support agencies, she found very fragmented service offerings across many companies. “Most approach their prospects like vendors peddling goods with a subscription level plan and rigid delivery, which was far from the integrated service deliver- workflow- I wanted our clients to experience or the partner- mentality I was looking for,” explains Lisa.

Canning knew from her own experiences and from helping others that small business owners needed expert-level advice and masterful storytelling to create compelling and efficient content and promotion to bring them to the next level more easily. Small businesses are often very chaotic working environments. Helping them to create a solution that smooths out their sales and marketing functions predictably was key.

To address this issue, Sales Maven looked at mid-tier agencies to create a blend between high level consulting and affordable service offerings, which now include: marketing and sales strategy, outside and inside sales representation, digital advertising campaigns, SEO strategy and implementation, content & website development, graphic design, video & branding services, social media engagement, CRM & customer service management, and research and list building services.

Sales Maven’s workforce is comprised of mostly half-time talent across the globe. Not only does this reduce its labor and benefit costs, but by design, it offers its workers the ability to have financial stability while simultaneously giving them the ability to pursue their interests and aspirations for personal growth. With many stay-at-home moms from a team of nearly 100, this appears to be a winning strategy.

Creating Predictability for Small Business

For those who run and/or manage growing small businesses, every day presents a steady stream of opportunities and challenges that can impact the health of a company’s deal flow. From a marketing and sales perspective, Sales Maven assumes the responsibility of helping clients become so comfortable with the alignment between their marketing and sales objectives that they can easily recognize those opportunities and challenges that fit and those that don’t. Efficiency and consistency help to create predictable growth. Illuminating the pathway to get there creates a state of ease and flow to the process for both our clients and our internal teams working with them equally.

When sales and marketing are aligned, companies can realize up to a 200 percent increase in revenue; they win more customers 38 percent of the time. Alignment improves engagement and is 36 percent more likely to help you keep a customer for a longer time frame. It’s also financially prudent because it’s been proven to save time and money.

“Our goal is to help our clients clarify and then simplify their key marketing and sales messaging to create greater resonance, ignite interest, and as a result, close sales faster. We deliver a high level of research, consulting support as well as the execution of sales and marketing services like mid-market agencies do for our clients affordably and efficiently”, said Heather McNeice, Chief Operating Officer.

Sales Maven seeks to create a cohesive, stable environment for sales and marketing to flourish within their clients’ organizations. Their goal is to create a state of flow.

The fflow Collaboration

With an eye towards their future growth, Sales Maven invested early on into a partnership with software developer Sarah Eggleston from the UK. Having hit the whole-organization problem harder and faster than most agencies because their teams are widely distributed geographically, Sales Maven ran into large enterprise challenges around the ease of communication and collaboration earlier than most.

What brought Canning and Eggleston together was their shared understanding that they are entering a world where many business technology problems have been solved from a technology point of view. Still, they are at the beginning of developing them based on behavioral science. Existing software nearly always tries to solve a single problem for one team; for example, invoicing software is built for the finance team, while time tracking software is built for the contributing consultants. But finance cares about the project and the invoice, while both the operations team and customers want to see how an invoice matches up to work done. The innovation for the solution called fflow is to develop a robust solution that dramatically improves how teams communicate with other internal teams and with customers.

“fflow’s goal is to build a user-friendly solution for a whole business. We are working to find a balance by doing many things minimally, which is why we’re also heading down a route to integrate with existing tools. It also differentiates us from enterprise software that glues many existing products together - you might get a single software subscription. However, the underlying architecture is still solving one problem for each team, and collaboration is an afterthought, which tends to show up in the user experience”, stated developer Eggleston.

If you are interested in learning more about Sales Maven, you can set up a free consultation by reaching out to Lisa@SalesMaven.io

Leadership | Sales Maven

Lisa Canning (CEO) is no stranger to entrepreneurship. Having launched her first small business at the age of 17, she has built successful businesses and helped many grow their ideas into successful ventures and enterprises. Trained as a professional musician, growing up in a family of small business owners, Lisa brings 30+ years of experience in business strategy, sales, and customer acquisition with her. Heather McNeice, her COO, brings 15 years of international sales management experience from fortune 100.

“Our goal is to help our clients clarify and then simplify their key marketing and sales messaging to create greater resonance, ignite interest, and as a result, close sales faster.”