Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/757488
December 2016 • SMT Magazine 55 SUCCESSFUL SALES STRATEGIES to keep an eye open and see what's happening in the industry and try to apply the best new methods and practices. Las Marias: How should a sales plan be devel- oped? Krajnc: The sales plan should be developed to- gether with the manager, for instance, from a certain territory. That will take into consider- ation industries that are served, and it has to be done in conjunction with marketing because marketing is key to building awareness. Then the plan really should have clear objectives about what someone wants to achieve. You need to have a clear list of activities to do, be- cause activities are the one thing that we can re- ally manage. The rest of the outcomes are prac- tically uncontrollable. Las Marias: Speaking of marketing, how should you get the story about the company or the sto- ry about your product out there to support sales? Krajnc: We use different ways of doing market- ing, because marketing is a pretty large part of the organization within NI, so we have different groups that care about different activities. One group runs events like this, which is an event that requires a lot of publicity and a lot of in- formation about the products. It requires also that we bring quite a large portion of the eco- systems of our partners so that customers not only listen and hear from us, but that they also have a chance to listen to some of the custom- ers speak on what their ecosystem does on top of or in parallel with our product. This is one type of event, but we have seminars and a lot of electronic media like webinars, which is pretty strong, and we collaborate with people by ad- vertising in magazines. Las Marias: How should a company like NI target or select customers? Krajnc: Marketing is really a place where we first of all develop products so that we can sell those products to the customers. It's all cen- tered around a platform. As you have seen, we can target so many different industries. Really, there's no one single industry that would really stand out. We do some analysis about a coun- try's potential or the strongest industry areas in each of the countries and the application ar- eas that we can target in those. When we com- pile all that information, then we can some- how develop our compass about where we go with that.