How Could Your Sales Be Better?

Many business owners want business growth as one of their priorities...indeed when speaking to many owners, one of their concerns frequently revolves around sales and getting more growth. However, many, when asked will refer to a sales process that is haphazard, lacks in areas of detail and can often lead to lost opportunities. 

Many business owners realise there is untapped potential in their business and want better growth and feel by putting more financial resources into the sales it will yield results. However, before spending your hard-earned cash on more marketing or expanding your salesforce have you considered improving your sales process to make better use of existing resources and ultimately close more sales?

If you feel there is room for improvement, you're losing too many opportunities or you'd like to review how you are performing then read on.

What is your sales process?

This may seem a simple question, but let's start at the basics.

• Is there a written process that everyone in the business can follow? If there is, does everyone know it and follow it?
• Are results collated at each stage of the process and frequently analysed per salesperson or division or product?
• Do you actually know your results by day/week/month or quarter depending on your best financial period?
• Does everyone know the process and follow it as per the business requirements or are we shortcutting the process?

Your answers to the above questions will no doubt have you thinking about how to improve your process. Here are a few areas to start with.

Know Like & Trust

We all know that people buy from people. However, does your process facilitate a positive multi-touch step? Consider a simple retail purchase as one of your touches. A prospect enters, collects the merchandise and pays. However, even this sale is usually enhanced if the sales staff use their sales training to increase the number of items purchased and to persuade buyers to proceed with the sale. This is usually conducted over a number of touches. The more complex your client needs and/or your product, the more touches required. Each touch enhances the know, like and trust feeling your prospect gets when interacting with you. When dealing with individuals, 1 - 10 touches may be required to ensure the sale has the greatest opportunity to succeed. Think of a restaurant and the number of touches you have from the first enquiry, to booking and then the meal itself, where the number of touches will increase dramatically and at each touch the team should be using the opportunity to enhance the experience and increase the sales through more courses, sides, drinks etc.

A more complex business to business sale averages 10 - 12 touches before the sale is complete. Large corporate sales require on average 18 touches with sales executives having to network and contact many people within the organisation in order to ensure a favourable decision. Frequently sales executives fail to get buy-in for a large sale and give up without completing sufficient sales touches.

If you were to map out your sales process, how many touches are there and how could it be enhanced to maximise the effectiveness of the sales team?

What's the script?

You've mapped out your sales process, you know how many touches are part of there are, but now it's time to flesh out the process and put some skin on the bones. As a prospect, when you're dealing with a salesperson, they are almost invariably talking to you from a script. This is often so well-rehearsed that it may not feel like a script but it is nevertheless a tried and tested series of questions and key points the salesperson wants to get across. Conversely, other sales, especially sales from call centres are clearly scripted with no deviations allowed...and I'm sure you often feel the call is very stilted and 'unnatural'. So ensure your sales team know what they want to cover, in what order and most importantly how they are going to cover it using a sales script.

Measuring Performance

Modern client relationship measuring (CRM) software enable the sales team performance to be significantly enhanced through the measurement of the sales performance at each touch of the sale. However, you don't need to have a CRM to be able to measure the basic sales performance of the business. A simple spreadsheet can suffice. A key to improving your sales performance without having to invest in any technology, sales team or marketing is to improve what you are already doing. Measuring results and knowing where any weaknesses lie will improve sales performance.

Consider a business that received 100 leads in a month, followed up with 90 initial conversations, booked 80 appointments to see the client, submitted 80 proposals and converted 10. A 10% conversion rate of leads to sales and 12.5% of proposals to sales may be 'OK'. However, further questioning the sales staff reveals that they are automatically booking meetings with prospects without pre-qualifying them. Thus people with very little prospect of buying are sucking up valuable sales staff time. Sales staff are automatically going through the process of submitting proposals when the client is not in a position to buy or able to afford the product/service. After adjusting the process for the next month, and ensuring the correct questions are scripted during the initial phase the initial appointments are reduced to 50. From this, only 40 proposals are submitted ie half from the previous month. Adding some more touches into the sales process, such as after meeting discussions prior to proposing and following up professionally after the proposal, yielded 12 sales, a lead to sale conversion rate of 12% and 30% of proposals to sales. The increase in sales of just 2 is a good start to improving your sales process, especially when you consider that this is an increase of 20% above the previous month and will set you up well for achieving your budget for the year!

Sales Conversations

What actually happened in the above example? Why did the sales force manage to reduce their proposals yet increase their sales? The key to this goes back to process and scripting and touches. These were the steps taken:

• More questions were asked about the prospect from the initial conversation covering why they wanted a quote, what were their reasons for contacting the business and what was their budget.
• More emotional questions were added to gain more understanding of the reasons for the purchase and most importantly how their lives would be changed after the purchase.
• At the sales meeting, all the decision-makers were present and a greater understanding of their needs was made as well as confirming key details as to when where and why. The sales staff were able to determine if this prospect was likely to buy or not and therefore whether to go forward to a proposal.
• Outline pricing was given at the sales meeting so the pricing was no surprise to the prospect.
• The proposal was greatly enhanced to refer to their reasons for undertaking the service, eliciting emotional as well as logical responses.

Final Analysis

If you're a busy business owner and you feel you want more growth, without investing more money in marketing, take time to review your sales process to tighten up any areas of concern. Is the process written down? Do your staff fully understand it and are they following it?

If you'd like a simple tool to measure each stage of your monthly sales process, reach out to me and I'll send it through.

#salesprocess #growth #salesimprovement #salesincrease

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