Efficiency Starts With The Product Sales

Sales, it makes the world go round. If it wasn't for sales you wouldn't have a job, or a roof over your head, you wouldn't be reading this, you wouldn't be holding a mobile phone, you wouldn't have chosen to be a 'traveller', or have strong feelings about the environment... you get the point.

Every action you take in life will have been based on some sort of sales message, be it a TV ad, a friend, a book you read when you were 12 years old... But some sales messages work better than others, and it isn't just because one sales person is better than another.

A lot is said about sales people, there is still a dislike for them which I find bizarre. After all, MOST sales people only want to help you. Gone are the days of sheepskin-coat-wearing shafters selling you dodgy goods you don't need, for the most part, but that's for you to work out.

A lot is also said about 'sales efficiency', and sadly for most organisations this focuses on the salesperson, their sales process, and their activity levels, all of which are very important, but how often does your organisation use salespeople in the wider effort?

A clever person I know said sales was a function of marketing, yet typically you see sales people under more pressure than marketers of the same product, why is that?

If your product needs work, a salesperson might sell it 1 in 100 times, end up on performance review, get sacked, leave because they aren't earning commission etc, but if your product is fantastic, the same salesperson might sell it 1 in 10 times, earn a healthy bonus, evangelise about your brand, and make you and them very happy. So, logic tells us, to make your sales team more efficient, you should focus on the product itself, all the time, and not the maths of selling.

Often, people are driven by money, they want to make the money first, to invest in improving the product second. If your product needs development, get funding, seek investment, partner, affiliate, change, DEVELOP, but don't pressure sales unless they are under-performing (activity, not revenue). Good salespeople are relentless in their pursuit, there aren't enough hours in the day to help everyone they want to, so consider that you might irreversibly damage a persons reputation, their career, and your own, by applying pressure in the wrong areas.

No product is perfect, yet sales processes and activity levels are a constant thing, subject to a little fine tuning of course. So surely, your best route to increasing efficiency is to use your sales staff in this wider effort, after all, they are the people most likely to have all the right words, ideas, phrases etc that can drive your product to be better, that's why you hired them, and they will know better than anyone what the shortcomings to your product are, because they answer those objections dozens of times a day, and... if an idea that wins happens to be theirs, you're onto an absolute winner with that person! Why cut out the people who do more 121 meetings with 'the market' in a day than anyone else in your entire business does in a week? Because you're the boss? Because it's not their job? Hmm..

I've seen company environments where sales and marketing interdepartmental relationships have become toxic, competitive, destructive, and what is the point of that?! I've often heard things like, "marketing just want to give away everything we're trying to sell", and other such nonsense. So think on that - if you don't allow your sales team to be involved in, lead even, the wider marketing and product development effort, opting to keep them 'focused' on sales, you could divide your workforce, become misaligned, create negative competition, demoralise your sales team and destroy your net efficiency.

A broken clock is right twice a day - a bad product can be sold some of the time. So, make sure your product, process, and marketing is in shape and always able to evolve, before you start forecasting all those millions, and you might get where you hope to be a bit quicker.