Over the last ten years I have literally spoken to and worked with thousands of business owners in almost every imaginable industry. One of the common themes that keep coming up is what businesses seem to lack – let me explain. Here are some of the frustrations – “We are not generating enough revenue from our sales and customers”; “We’ve got a great product and service, we just can’t seem to get enough customers”; “Our sales team is not producing enough sales”; “We seem to be working really hard and not getting the results”; “We don’t know what our sales people are doing out there”. These are just some of the examples that highlight the lack of systems and tools to help a business grow effectively.
Over 90% of Australian businesses do not have a clearly defined sales process that is designed to consistently generate great customers that will invest as much as possible in their products and services and then nurture those clients into coming back again and again. These are three fundamental areas that impact directly on the growth of any business in any industry.
Let me walk you through a six step process that can dramatically improve your chances of generating great business from great customers.
Step 1 – To define and set the purpose of your business
With any objective there needs to be an understanding of the outcome. Like with any successful plan, we must begin with the end in mind. So for your business, what are you trying to achieve and why are you trying to achieve it? What is the real reason you are doing what you are doing? What is the purpose of your business? Once you have defined these, it is important to share your vision and ideals with the very people who will help you along the road to achieve those results. “So many people fail to plan and in doing so plan to fail”. If you look at the most successful businesses in Australia today, both small and large, a big reason for that growth is that they have clearly defined their purpose, they share their vision with their team and their customers, and they look to innovate constantly so that they grow and prosper profitably. So a key fundamental is to create a plan of what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it. Be specific.
Step 2 – Identify and target profitable customers
It makes sense that if you want to make more money in your business you need to identify what you perceive to be a profitable customer. The best place to look is your existing customers. Now, your biggest customer may not necessarily be your most profitable customer. In fact, they may be costing you money. So you need to clearly look at who your profitable customers really are and ask questions. Who are they? Where do they come from? How much do they invest in your products and services? How often do they buy from you? What’s their demographic? Are they from an industry specific group? Are their suppliers potential clients for you? Are their customers potential clients as well? The idea is to do a survey that gives you a strong indication of where you can start looking for profitable customers. Common sense tells us that if you focus on generating profitable customers your profits would have to increase.
Step 3 – Designing a proactive contact strategy
Once you know who your customers are and why they should buy from you, you have to look at how you’re going to communicate with them. Most businesses rely on advertising or word of mouth to generate enquiries and sales. Without measuring and monitoring the success of these strategies, they have little control in growing their business. The idea is that if you have multiple strategies focused on generating more clients you dramatically improve your chances of getting more business. So rather than have two strategies imagine implementing four or five strategies.
For example I had a client in the travel industry who was targeting corporate clients for their travel bookings. So rather than just advertising in magazines, letting people know that they provide corporate travel services as many of their competitors do, we devised four strategies that would target specific industries that consistently booked corporate travel.
The first strategy was a fax out campaign with a response devise attached that articulated great savings in corporate travel. The second strategy was to send out an email newsletter that educated prospective corporate clients on how they could manage their travel more effectively. The third strategy was to survey specific corporate companies on what they thought would help them achieve better results in handling their travel arrangements. The fourth strategy was to run seminars to educate corporate travelers in efficient travel management. These strategies were only targeted to one hundred businesses and in the space of two months had yielded nine clients that generated over $4.3 million in travel bookings.
By only running an ad this travel company would have limited their opportunity in generating a corporate client because they never would have come close to articulating the value in one advertisement and by taking a targeted and strategic approach they achieved an extraordinary result. How many strategies do you have in place that are consistently targeting your customers and are you measuring and managing the results of those strategies?
Step 4 – Train and manage your sales people
For many business owners one of the frustrating challenges can be the lack of performance of their sales management or of sales people. Most of the challenges are due to the lack of training, structure, systems to manage and assess sales people and support to assist them.
The key here is train them, don’t blame them. To improve the performance of your sales people there needs to be consistent training in specific skills sets, here are some to consider:
*Have regular product training and educate the sales person in the benefits of the product or service has to the customer
*Conduct communications skills training specifically in the areas of selling and relationship skills so that your team can build better rapport with prospects and customers
*Develop their time management skills so that they can maximize their productivity
*Provide personal development training in the areas of life skills so that they create a balance and can perform at their peak
For your sales people to consistently perform well, you need to implement continual training to reinforce the fundamentals.
Step 5 – The management of sales
The old adage “you can manage what you measure” stands very true in effective sales management. One of the questions I ask all business owners is have they set a target or a budget for achievement in place and is every team member who is responsible for contributing to that target, aware of their specific contribution. In many cases they do have a budget, however, in most cases they don’t tell anybody about it. So if your sales team is not aware, how can they possibly achieve expected results. You may think this is funny, but you would be surprised how many people don’t set revenue budgets and targets. And you wonder why up to 90% of businesses fail in the first five years of being in business.
I have helped clients set budgets and targets and put in measurement structures for their sales peoples performance and the results have been remarkable. To give you an example, I worked with a printing firm and we set a quarterly target that was 25% above their previous record. We then set an expected target for all their sales people to achieve. We then measured their performance on a weekly basis and within the first month they had reached a 25% increase in revenue. So we increased the budget to 40% and by the third month they had actually achieved a growth of 65%. This was largely due to the fact that we consistently reinforced and constantly focused the team to achieve that objective. “What you focus on most, becomes real to you”.
A simple plan to increase your sales revenue:
*Set quarterly sales budgets
*Set monthly reviews
*Give you team sales targets to achieve
*Measure their productivity and performance
*Reward the individuals and the team for achievement
Note that if you as the business owner are the sales person, you would also apply the same principles to yourself.
Step 6 – Educate, nurture and retain
A big part of your sales process is to continually educate your prospective and existing clients as well as to nurture your relationship and that you retain your profitable clients for as long as possible.
The idea is to look at ways of adding value to your prospects and clients by helping them to either gain more benefits from dealing with you and to maximize your selling opportunity by making sure they are aware of all the products and services you sell.
A good example of this is a telecommunications company I consulted to had developed an outstanding customer relationship management tool to not only generate “A” class clients but more importantly, to retain its clients. Here is part of the program they had implemented.
First of all, every client received a monthly newsletter in electronic and printed form to educate them with regard to new services and also to give them ideas on how to perform better in business by having business authors contribute with valuable information on management, sales, marketing etc.
Every quarter each client would have their contract reviewed and upgraded at no cost to the client so that they were always getting the best service possible. They would be given personal development programs twice a year on motivation and business and they would be invited to seminars and special events throughout the year free of charge.
They also implemented a program that touched their clients personally by sending a personal gift every other month. The purpose of this program was to acknowledge and thank the client for their support. The gift took the form of a book, magazine, movie tickets or a bottle of wine. This program was personal in its nature as information on their interests was gathered by the sales team.
The results from this program were phenomenal. Their retention rate of clients was 99%. They found that clients stayed on their contracts twice as long and the referrals from their clients were of an exceptional standard.
Look at the leaders in your industry. Observe the sales processes they employ and how they has contributed to the growth of their organization. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel – the fundamentals of a good sales process are simple and easy to implement. The key is to be clear about what you want and be committed to achieving your purpose.
John Logar helps organisations achieve more than they thought possible through consulting, coaching, keynote presentations, seminars and training in the areas of leadership, values, team performance, marketing and risk management. John has addressed and consulted to over 1,000 organisations in commerce, government and not-for-profit. For FREE sales and marketing resources and downloads go to http://johnlogar.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment