How to Sell More of What You Sell- 5 Insights
Five ways we look at a business to drive develop sales and marketing success.
Having now worked directly in, consulted, and trained in the sales area, I have come to realize that simply responding to the question, “what do you do?” with a simple, “we teach people how to sell”, does not begin to tell the story. So, let me better explain not what we do, but what you must do to sell more of what you sell — and how to maximize profitability of what you sell. These are two areas I am certain most business owners, leaders, and salespeople want to know. Selling is the one thing they still do not teach in most colleges.
Sales today is not necessarily more complex than it was when I started at 16, but there are certainly more moving pieces, and there are also more places and opportunities where you can engage with your customer. In fact, from our experience, developing a proper sales and marketing strategy today requires at least 22 different items to be considered, in order to be successful. It does not mean all of the 22+ will work in every business, but it does mean that you need to look at them all to make sure you are covering all the bases and maximizing your results and returns.
Today, I understand that to grow business, owners, leaders, and salespeople become too single solution focused, or, organizations try to separate the roles for sales success without taking a step back and building an overall strategy. The most obvious one is when the sales leadership and marketing are not working together to develop success with common goals and activities.
Here is how we look at a business to properly develop sales and marketing success:
First- Intelligence
You need to make sure you are going to establish the right metrics when developing a growth or improvement plan.
In my 30+ years, I have learned that if you can consistently measure the following:
- Financial results
- Sales activity results
- Inventory/Capacity
- ROI on marketing
These will guide you to stay on top of, and be able to better manage your business growth plan.
Second Strategize
Besides determining who your customers are, you need to look at the 22+ areas in developing a proper sales and marketing strategy. Your customers can walk in your door on the web, through a phone call, or actually walk-in. The web is what has really changed things. Customers are literally checking out your business every day, at any moment, and in most cases, businesses have weak or no strategy to view and analyze what these potential clients are doing in this portal to your business.
This means you also may not have carefully designed plans to drive these potential customers to this very opportune part of your business. Perhaps, to make this statement clearer, when I started, the plan was to advertise in the paper, or on television or radio, plus maybe having your salespeople do some prospecting. Today there are so many more ways to drive traffic, advertise, engage with customers, and sell. This means that you need to truly take this step back and maximize your efforts, in order to get the best results and return on your effort.
Be careful not to be too quick to try out the newest, or what appears to be the easiest, answer to getting more business.
Third – Execution
Now that you have developed a plan, you next need to determine how to best execute on it. Laying out what tools, locations, and talent you need will be key to executing the plan. In all cases, your best solution might be hiring out partner companies or trusted partners to help you grow. Even some of the largest businesses in the world do not solve every part of their sales and marketing solution with internal tools, their own locations, with their own employees.
What I am trying to say is, be very careful with your do-it-yourself solution to building your business. But you will need some internal talent and support to make this happen, and clearly defining roles and expectation in selling will be key to your success. This will also help you determine the best ways for your people to be prepared for success.
Remember that “Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance” — try to say that fast three times.
Fourth- Daily Delivery
Now, you will need to have a clear vision as to how things will work for your sales and marketing on a daily basis. You will need to adapt to specific market, product, and customer situations, but you now have a plan to move forward. All great sales and marketing leaders are constantly delivering results while they “inspect what they expect” from the daily efforts of everyone involved in their business. If you were Henry Ford, and declared that a new car would come off the line every minute, you would certainly be measuring it, and making sure that you were keeping your quality promise to the customer.
Today there are so many products and services we are loyal to, because we can count on them to keep their promise. Whether it is a phone connection when we dial, a hot cup of coffee, or the brakes working when we go to stop the car, it has been the efforts of daily delivery that make the entire effort work.
All of these things were promised in the marketing message and when the sale was made.
Fifth- Review and Adjust
Will this plan need to be adjusted from time to time?
Of course, in these fast-moving economic times, speed of change is absolutely one of the more important things that you need to be prepared to consider and adjust. Going back to the measurements that you determined in the first area of developing success in sales and marketing, your priority now should be planning to review your results regularly, and adjusting your efforts to make sure you continue to manage ongoing success.
In all of what I have described here, we are able to “teach people how to sell”.
