Sales contracts are the lifeblood of many companies. While enterprise-focused companies obviously value these, many companies that are consumer-facing are still eager to get signed contracts. Whether you're a restaurant that does catering, a hotel trying to get a conference agreement, or a home builder trying to get in a new development, all of these take significant effort to land.

Getting big contracts like these is really the responsibility of the sales and legal department, right? There's actually a lot that can be done through marketing to make their jobs easier. By coordinating efforts, the sales cycle can be shortened, and you can do more targeted marketing at clients who are a better fit for your organization.

Let's start with attracting the right clients. Billboards are a pretty bad way to get people to pull in corporate clients, not to mention these people are busy. You'll want to put out lots of information for prospects on your website. Why is your company better to work with? What do you do that's different? Who are some previous customers that were happy with your service? These are the main questions you'll want to answer for prospective clients.

Taking all of this information and formatting it into a whitepaper or a PDF also can help. That way, even if an intern gets tasked with finding out some options, they can easily forward it along to the decision maker. Plus, if you put a form up first, you've now generated a lead in your system you can monitor.
Once a prospect has expressed an interest, what do you do then? You can only call so much, but you can always send over additional information that will help them make their decision. By developing content that is relevant to a person in this point in the sales process, you can be non-intrusive but still continue to influence their decision.

Applying targeted content offers to your industry can give you a real advantage over your competitors. Not only can it help generate leads from people who are interested, but it also lets you monitor how effective your offers are at bringing in the right people. If you have multiple segments you want to target, consider tailoring your message for each one.

Using marketing to win business contracts is a great way to impact your bottom line. One of the best ways to manage a process like this is through a platform like Hubspot that can connect to your CRM. Without clear analytics on the effectiveness of your program, it will be difficult to know whether you're attracting the right people for your sales team to close.