The Magic Pill for Sales Success

By Craig Munns – Sales Innovation

What are your plans for your business? Is it to grow to a multinational, grow it to sell it off, or keep it small as more of a lifestyle choice? Your longer term goals for your business are important as they will determine the amount of planning and investment you need to make in the growth of your business.

Planning should be in all aspects of your business, but in my experience over many years of providing sales services (to all levels and types of industry) is that all sizes of organisation do not plan the sales side of their business.

Many, if not most businesses expect that sales will just ‘happen’. The best outcome of a ‘build it and they will come’ strategy (which is not a strategy), is minimal growth. Not having a strategy may be fine for a sole trading business owner that has made a lifestyle choice, and just depends on client referrals and their networking to make needs meet, but these alone will not grow a business significantly.

Invest in a proper strategy

A proper sales and marketing strategy is essential to the growth of your business, in fact I suggest that it is the most essential strategy your business can undertake. If you don’t have significant sales coming in, then your business will not grow!

Is there a magic formula? Is there a bottle of magic sales dust that you can sprinkle over the market to make it come to life? Obviously not. It comes down to good old fashioned process. A proper sales and marketing process is the key to your success!

What are the steps?

1. Never assume that your product or service is what the market wants. Sure, you may have made a few sales here and there, but this is no guarantee that the rest of the market is itching to buy.
2. Even if you are sure that your product or service is the right kind, never assume that they will buy it, or that they will buy when you want them to (there are many factors to a buying decision).
3. Undertake a market survey with a sample large enough to reflect your target market. Get your friendly marketing consultant to help you to develop the survey with relevant questions. Developing a proper survey is an art, and not to be undertaken lightly, so employ a professional to help you develop, deliver, and decipher the results.
4. From this, develop a market plan. This will include the results of the survey as well as your plans for your business (from your business plan), your goals for the business, and the market you want to work in.
5. From these results, you will be able to determine the types of approaches you will make to the market such as direct selling, mass advertising, seminars, search engine visibility, etc, or a combination of a few approaches (this the most likely outcome).
6. Next comes the development of the sales  plan. My expertise is in direct sales and tele-sales, so I’ll speak from this aspect.

Sales work best when they are supported by a number of different market approaches. In direct sales, it helps to pre-qualify the market (i.e. make the market aware of your brand and its benefits). This can be mass advertising (web or other mass media), seminars, telemarketing, or most likely  a combination of these. Develop a plan to approach the market from your chosen aspects.

Track Everything

Develop a way to track your leads (i.e. people who express interest), opportunities (i.e. people who express interest in actually buying), and actual sales (called closing deals). This is called a pipeline. I suggest that it be kept in something tangible, like a spreadsheet, Outlook, or ideally, CRM software (which is specifically designed to track sales).

Record your efforts in your pipeline. This makes sure that nothing falls through the cracks, and you can also benchmark your efforts.

Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up!

If people make enquiries, call them back! Have patience and tenacity!

Don’t give up on the first call! You may have to call people several times before you are able to get any sort of commitment! Don’t give up if tangible sales haven’t started in 3 months. It may take up to 2 years, especially if your product or service is a new concept.

Get Professional Help

Employ a professional salesperson or sales organisation to increase your sales. Like all professions, sales requires skill and knowledge, so if you are growing your business, get the right people in to grow with you!

These tips will not ensure your success (the market will always have the final say), but following these processes will give you the best possible opportunity.

Regards,

Craig Munns

About Craig Munns:

Craig has run a sales consulting business, Sales Innovation, for the last 9 years. His business currently employs staff across three centres, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Previous to that, he worked as a sales professional and Branch Manager for a number of organisations, local, national, and multinational. Craig likes to help people to develop their businesses, and is happy to tell all for a cup of coffee. Craig is married with two fur-kids. In his spare time, he sings, sails, and plays flute (not all at once, but two out of three is possible).