Debra was flustered. She had taken over a business with the intent of growing it but had come to the realization that increasing sales might be easier said than done.
She recognized that because of the added overhead expenses of her operations, sales would have to grow 50 per cent from current revenue to ensure the business was profitable.
Increasing sales isn’t hard – most businesses probably grow organically from referrals at a few percentage points every year. This is fine if your referrals are greater than your loss of customers due to attrition.
However, if you want to grow your sales in the double digits, as Debra does, there are some basic steps you need to implement.
Have a plan
It’s amazing how many companies don’t have a basic sales plan. Sales plans typically have three parts.
Goals: Clarity about what we’re trying to achieve. What does winning in sales mean? What’s the target we’re trying to hit? Are we focused on selling a specific product or service, or everything in general?
Strategy: How are we going to win? This includes the overarching framework of where we’re going to focus over the upcoming period to achieve our goals. This might include focusing on the strengths we have over our competition, specific markets we’re going to target, or a technique we’re going to employ.
Tactics: This is the nitty gritty about how we’re going to implement the strategy. We want to break down the steps necessary for succeeding and put them into time frames, as well as attach responsibilities to them.
Be accountable
Most companies forget to keep people accountable for achieving goals, meeting timelines and getting stuff done.
It’s great to have a sales plan but if that plan isn’t implemented in a timely fashion, sales will flounder. We want to have specific targets for our sales teams as a whole but also for specific sales people.
We should be looking at keeping people accountable for setting a number of meetings, phone calls, new and existing customer contacts.
Change it up
So often we see companies that run the same campaign month after month, year after year. While this might work for some companies, chances are it won’t work for you. Not only will your customers get bored with your sales campaigns, so will you.
In order to succeed, we need to be creative with our sales. We need to pick different products or services to focus on at different times of the year. If you only have a couple products, you might want to focus on different markets or demographics, different customer needs or a variety of campaigns.
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So how much is a business worth?
To be successful in sales, we want our teams to have incentives to succeed with a variety of spiffs, contests or opportunities. Changing it up gives new energy to our sales force. As they say, variety is the spice of life.
Unfortunately, many businesses will implement one of the three suggestions and hope that they’re going to grow their sales substantially. The reality is that unless the three components are used synergistically, sales growth rarely happens.
Debra will grow her sales because she’s implementing a plan, holding her team accountable and changing it up. How about you?
Dave Fuller, MBA, is an award-winning business coach and a partner in the firm Pivotleader Inc. Slumping sales? Email [email protected]. For interview requests, click here.
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