Excerpt

This article is intended for small business owners who desire to grow their business and are dissatisfied with small incremental sales performance: you want something better from your sales organization than what’s currently being produced. 

Background 

We tend to perceive only that which our beliefs allow us to see. There is much science behind this statement - see definitions if you want to explore the details. Notice in the article image the focal point is the table top, yet nothing past it: the rest of the image is blurry.

This is our metaphor for leadership concentration. Our intention with the image is that it mirrors how small business owners perceive their world - most often only those things right in front of them. And for many, that varies day by day. 

Your Ability to Perceive 

If you are like many business owners, you are a subject matter expert in either the products or services that you deliver to your customers. You may have some experience in managing either marketing and/or sales but for the most part, this is not your forte: this is common among your peers (see footnote 1). 

Another point too, may be that your own selling experience is mainly focused upon negotiating and closing the business with your counter-part - your prospect’s leader like yourself. 

In any case, your ability to perceive what is actually occurring inside your sales organization may be limited to your own experiences. And more importantly, the what’s and the how-to’s needed to change things to produce more sales are unknown; this is a serious outstanding challenge. If these circumstance just mentioned resonate with you, we believe you will gain insights from this read. 

What it Takes to Understand Your Sales Group 

To gain an understanding of what is occurring in your sales organization, you’ll need to compare your sales activities and processes to a set of best practices (see footnote 2). This will get to the heart of what your sales group does and doesn’t do. The task is a fearless act of becoming aware of what is really happening on a day-to-day basis. You probably don’t have the experience, talents and skills inside your business to be able to accomplish this alone and that’s alright. 

To gain this awareness about your sales group, an experienced sales professional and leadership mentor would ask you a set of questions which covers some of the following major topics:

• Your philosophy of your business - why your business exists and how your products and/or services address the needs of your market

• Knowing details about your prospects, what they need, why and how they buy

• How you address lead generation and prospecting

• How you deal with pipeline management and other selling metrics

• What kinds of processes you have in place to effect repeat sales

• How you manage and sustain customer relationships

• How you understand your sales people to predict their sales performance with more certainty than today.

These points are selectively summarized to provide you with a high-level appreciation to gain a perspective of what must occur. 

We call this investigative analysis activity a Sales Best Practices Audit, similar in nature to how your CFO or accounting firm looks at your financial status, but from a selling perspective. 

Market’s and Technology Today 

You know more about your market than anyone else. But, what you may not know is how your market’s are changing, how your customers and prospects are changing and what your competitors are doing. 

Sales has dramatically evolved in the past five years, spurred on by heavy use of technology which helps to shift sales people from hunting to actually closing more business. No longer do your sales people need to cold call or tap the prospects for detailed information about their business. Most of these lead generation activities can be automated with marketing and sales automation, along with customer relationship management (CRM) software, for dramatically lower cost than your sales people doing these task and with very good to high results. 

Regardless of the size of your small business, technology can expand your reach to more prospects, increase penetration into your market in areas not even imaged, and also widen your market size. Technology today is an absolute must to help you compete more effectively. Without it, your lead generation will suffer, along with your business. 

Incremental Change 

You may already be experiencing incremental change in your sales organization and still not produce the level of effectiveness you want: increasing your customer base and adding new sales. 

We realize that you have probably been doing things a certain way for a long time: perhaps getting 3% to 6% sales increases but never really having consistency or attaining high numbers: predictability and reliability has been elusive.  

However, to gain the level of performance needed to grow your business for a 15% to 25% increase in sales revenues will require a high level of commitment to change - coupled with much patience to get the right things in place so it can occur. 

This usually requires redesigning the way you approach your lead generation practices, a distinct requirement to implement a repeatable sales process, coupled with coaching your sales people individually to gain improved performance. 

This all sounds good, but is it doable for your business? Maybe, maybe not. 

Acceptance 

One of the most difficult circumstances is to accept where you and your business are today. You maybe be able to see some trends in your financials and review the typical sales feedback, but a closer inspection is required to truly understand what’s occurring. 

The acceptance step is often overlooked especially when you get buried in the details of each day’s operations. The often overused expression of “you working in your business” instead of “you working on your business” actually applies here. 

We suggest you take step away from your daily activities for a few moments to consider what you really want and what you’re willing to do about it. 

If you want to explore the possibilities of what’s actually occurring with your sales organization, we invite you to join us in a short teleconference to learn more about how to approach evaluating your sales group. We invite you to schedule a free 30 minute telephone meeting. 

Footnotes 

1. CEO Focus - references to SMB CEO group concensus spanning the period from 2001 through 2017.

2. SalesQB’s Sales Best Practices have been culled from many current skilled and adroit sources spanning enterprise and SMB marketing and sales best practices and embodied in their SalesQB library (i.e. frequently updated) and loaded into a proprietary software application which takes investigative answers and analyzes them to the best practices library.