LET'S TALK ABOUT SALES

I often talk about how sales and PR are not the same discipline, they are aligned yet separate. You need to curate skills in both areas of business and one doesn't tend to happen without the other.

Persuading people of the value of PR (once they understand what PR actually is) is tricky enough as visibility and audience engagement involves a variety of tools, depending on the type of business you have, its size, your goals - and not every tool will work all of the time.

Therefore when people want certainty in business (if that even ever really exists) then PR, my area, will rarely work for them because I cannot give cast iron guarantees. Indeed I see PR companies every day talking about ROI, KPIs, etc etc and most of it is utter BS. Part of your big monthly retainer with firms like that will go on tracking to provide 'proof' of visibility and while visibility can be proved - often resulting sales cannot. There is often no direct line of sight between one activity and one sale.

The reason is that the 'media relations' part of PR can only bring guarantees when you are buying advertorial space - and even then you cannot guarantee sales. Also you may get a ton of engagement on a social media post, blog or a media article - but that may not translate into a single sale. On another day you could do a post which three people have looked at and two people buy. Human beings are not always predictable and PR is all about human beings, their stories...

Many business owners who want such impossible guarantees forget that they are engaging in PR activity but it's the activity which makes more sense to them. This could be branded vans, branded clothing, paid for ads, pay per click or SEO which is paid for - they will pay out a lot and see that as more valid because of the analytics attached to it. However how many people know for sure how many sales their branded vehicles have brought in? Or their building signage? Analytics are great in the world of digital but it does not always mean you are getting sales.

I often point to the fact that my most popular LinkedIn post which, to date, has had more than 180,000 impressions and more comments than I can ever answer, has not brought me one sale which I can directly link back to it.

What 'spreadsheet' people often do not put into the financial mix is - the cost of their business development team in terms of salary; their cost in terms of time spent trying to land contacts; the cost of meetings which go nowhere or somewhere; the cost of the signage on their building; the cost of training those relevant teams, the cost of lengthy telephone conversations...they analyse what they want to to suit their own unconscious or conscious bias. We all do this in the world of small business because so much is 'on us' and it all comes down to 'us'. It's not the same if you work for a much larger company.

I often take my steer from my husband who has worked in the telecoms industry for well over 30 years routinely working on multi-million pound contracts and that company's expectation of sales. They look to convert around one to five per cent of marketing activity ie. PR. The amount of spend to get those conversions is eye-watering. Even though the sales and pre-sales team has got smaller over that long period of time, the spend is still enormous. When I look at this I think 'I'm not doing too badly then'.

Having said all of that - sales are vital and critical to a business surviving. It sounds obvious of course but PR and investment in the tactics that work for you are critical to selling. The more active you are, the more people you will reach, the more sales you should make.

One problem can come when you have a business owner - often from a micro business - who never shows people the 'till'. You have to know when to ask for the money and for many business owners this feels very icky. It's incredibly emotional to ask for the sale and to 'sell' and we react to this very emotionally too. We tend to buy emotionally and justify intellectually in the world of the smaller enterprise.

There is no blue print when it comes to 'how often' to sell, I've heard people say there is and I've sat on courses where they say there is - but I've realised that there's not. Not in the world where sales come from people to people contact and not through some kind of tendering or procurement process (that's a little different).

We all have to work out our own sales process around what we 'feel' is right for us and this can be very personal. What is factual though is that trying to 'fake it' will not work ultimately. You have to achieve sales on way or another.

Here are a few general mistakes people make when it comes to showing people the till:

*The biggest one is not showing up enough - you are simply not 'out there' enough so that enough people are seeing you and deciding to buy. Posting on social media once per month, or being very busy for a period and then doing nothing will not achieve the consistency you need. Your biggest amount of time and budget should be going on PR!

*You do not have a balance between planning and impulsivity. Planning for events where are you are looking to sell high value tickets needs to happen months in advance, months. People will tend not to buy at short notice unless the subject matter is very topical or you have a VIP group somewhere who will buy from you often.

*Sharing a ton of stories around your day, your week, your month, your expertise and yet never mentioning how and what people can buy from you.

*Not funnelling people who often show interest on to your email newsletter list or into your Facebook group or into your VIP circle.

*Not having a graduated way in which people can buy from you - from low cost to medium cost to higher cost (a value ladder).

*Not having the courage to ask for the money - I relate this to conversations in the real world or online where someone says 'can you just' and you not 'just' saying 'yes I can help with that, what's your budget for it?'.

*Not understanding that when you ask for the money, kindly and mindfully, you tend to attract others who expect to pay for your expertise. You do attract what you keep asking for and if you keep allowing freeloaders to freeload guess what happens?

I'm not a sales expert but this stuff is important. You do need, over time, to build a structure around how people can buy from you and how they can keep buying over time and the structure can be roughly the same even if you are buying a product or a service.

If you need support - either training or retained service around your visibility - you know who to ask? (that's the sales bit in case you've missed it).