It is a good idea for most business folks to hire a sales expert, marketing specialist, or communications specialist.

The reason why it’s a good idea to do so at some point is because most of us struggle from time to time with our marketing, managing our sales and customer services processes, and off course we’re perennially worrying about how effective our business communications are.

However before we hire any of these individuals, there are a few things we need to figure first.

Before you hire a marketing or communications specialist, or sales expert you have to figure out who your customer is.

The average marketing specialist is going to assume that you know who your customer is and plug away at ideas to reach them with brilliant marketing campaigns and advertising.

The problem is, if you don’t know who your ideal target audience or who your ideal customer is, then you’ll be spending money chasing down the wrong customer.

If this kind of marketing works, then you’ll be bringing people in who aren’t a fit for the kind of goals you hope to achieve as a business.

Before you call the marketing specialist in, and before you call in someone to improve your Google and Instagram advertising, be sure that you know FOR SURE who your customer is.

You can’t blame the marketing specialist for not delivering if you set them on the wrong target in the first place.

Luckily the communications experts are always concerned about being EFFECTIVE in communications so they’ll want to cross check from the beginning that they have the right recipient for all the communications you guys will be blasting out.

If you don’t know for sure who your ideal customers or who the primary stakeholders are, don’t worry... the communications specialist will help you out with that.

Just make sure you have a good starting point in the first place.

The sales process on the other hand already has it built in that you should be talking to a “qualified” customer.

This is someone who has a want or a need, a reasonable certain time frame for taking action, and can afford your product or service.

The sales professional will want to be sure that they’re talking to the ideal customer from the get go.

In either scenario you can see that if you’ve already started asking yourself these hard questions, you should have enough information to make sure you get the most out of the investment of having a sales consultant, marketing specialist, or communications specialist.

Ask yourself these hard questions today so that your money can be well invested tomorrow when you call in the professionals.