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Six steps to improve your sales results

Having worked with many businesses over the years, to help them improve their sales results, it became apparent that there are often a similar set of core issues that each faced. This is a summary of those issues and some initial pointers on how to overcome them.

1. What is your market and position in it?

Being clear about your market, where you are in it and where you want to be are essential foundations to creating a plan to get there. A few simple questions help to clarify this.

• What do you sell?
• Who do you sell to today?
• Who are your ideal customers?
• Who are your competition?
• What is your Unique Sales Proposition - USP?

What is a USP?

It can be identified by completing the phrase "Customers will buy from me because my business is the only/best..."

For example, my own USP at Cognitive is a combination of:

• Award-winning sales track record
• Psychologist
• Can coach, mentor, train, or even do the job for you.
• I'm happy to 'put my money where my mouth is' with performance related rewards.

As well as a USP, it is useful to develop a Strap Line, which summarises what you are about in one short phrase. Examples of some are:

• Cognitive: The fast track to improving sales results.
• Audi: Vorsprung durch Technik.
• Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
• Heinz Baked Beans: Beanz Meanz Heinz
• KitKat: Have a break, have a KitKat
• What is yours ? Does it really sum up what you do, or reinforce your brand?

2. What does your offering do for your customer?

I often find that, in particular for clients with a technical product or service, their promotional materials such as the website or brochures talk lots about the technology and little or nothing about the benefits of using them.

This leaves the prospective customer to work out the benefits for himself, which is a risk you need not take. The answer here is to sell the benefits, not the features.

Look at features through the eyes of the person you are selling to. The more you know about your customers' needs, the easier this will be. Ask 'So what?' to each feature: the answers that you come up with are your potential benefits.

Ask your customers about the benefits that they see as well. You'll sometimes be surprised. For example, I've had clients who use me to help persuade the bank manager to lend their business money or to persuade venture capitalists that they are a good investment, by adding credibility to their management teams.

For your own products and services, for each feature, make a list of all the possible benefits that you can think of, then match the needs of each customer to what your product or service can offer. Don't forget the softer issues, often personal and emotional, which despite our best efforts often govern the buying decisions that we make (whether we realise it or not).

For example, for Cognitive, here are some features and the potential benefits to my clients:

Feature	Benefit
Qualified psychologist	Helps to understand motivation of buyers and behaviour of salespeople, making selling more effective.
Award winning sales track record	Experience can be applied to clients' situations to help win more business.
I'm happy to 'put my money where my mouth is' with performance based pricing	I share the risk and rewards of success and failure with my clients.
Client testimonials	More likely to do a good job
Almost 20 years sales and marketing experience	Likely to have solved many different problems.

 

3. Getting the right message out

There are potentially many tens, or even hundreds, of ways of getting your message out to your potential customers, but I often find that businesses get stuck in a rut of only using one or two and that there are often better approaches that can be taken (or even worse, try one, see no immediate success so stop all promotional activities).

All promotion should focus on getting the right message out to:

• the right people
• in the right way
• at the right time
• at the right cost.

Measure the return on investment (ROI)

The secret here is to try several different approaches on a small scale and the measure the return on investment from each, working out how much each sales lead costs. Do more of the ones that work best and modify or drop the ones that don't work as well.

It's also a good idea to do 'split testing' where you run two versions of the same promotion and see which works best. This is very easy to do with tools such as Google Adwords. In general, you ought to have a range of promotional activities in progress at any time, so that if one dries up you have other channels delivering leads and a basis for comparison.

This approach really does work. I have one client who was putting almost all their budget into one approach (an annual trade show) but found that an alternative much less expensive approach (on-line pay-per-click advertising) produced much better results and on a regular basis.

Simple changes to wording of advertisements can make a dramatic difference to response rates. The effects are often not what you might predict, so experimentation is vital to get the best results.

How many different ways do you promote your business? You should experiment with at least six and see what works best for you. What PR do you do? This can be a free way of getting your message out and often works much better than advertising.

Are you making best use of social and business networking facilities such as Ecademy and Linked-in?

4. Sales tools

Would you try and work as a car mechanic without some basic tools? If you did, at best, it would take you much longer to get the job done, at worst you simply could not complete the work.

Apply this principle to marketing and selling and you'll soon discover that having the right tools makes the job a whole lot easier, more fun and more profitable.

Examples of some suitable tools are:

• Happy client testimonials
• Demonstrations
• Samples
• Case studies
• Templates for everything.

Testimonials are probably the most powerful tools available as they are an independent indicator of your ability to do a good job. Assuming that you do deliver a good product or service, most clients are happy to give a testimonial if approached in the right way at the right time.

Here is an example testimonial for Cognitive:

"Cognitive Sales Consulting helped us create an environment that

supports accelerated contract wins and their expert analysis of our

sales and marketing processes has helped put us firmly on the path of

continual improvement"

Alex Fidgen, Sales Director of MWR InfoSecurity.

How much more credibility does this carry than if I were to say it?

5. Qualification

In sales there is always more work that could be done and it is not unusual to have more potential activity on the go than you can handle. So you have to choose between trying to give everything equal priority (the shotgun approach) or carefully select the best opportunities (the guided missile approach). Guess which would work best? You can blast away at anything that moves with your shotgun in the hope that you will hit something every now and then, or you can carefully pick out the best targets with your guided missiles one at time.

If you are not choosing which opportunities to go for and which to pass over, in a repeatable, measurable way then you are wasting money on wild goose chases and missing business that could be yours.

A common issue is chasing every opportunity with equal vigour, as this dilutes the resources that you could be applying to the 'best few' where you have a much better chance of winning and also of gaining happier customers as well.

In general, unless you are 'qualifying-out' of some opportunities then there is scope for improvement here.

A simple tool to help with qualification is called 'B A N T', which looks at the four key ingredients that must come together to make a deal

• Budget
• Authority
• Need
• Timescale.

Budget

Have they got any money to spend on this? Have they got enough? Are we on the same page on costs? What about payment terms and deposits?

Authority

Am I talking to the REAL decision maker? Ask them if any one else would need to rubberstamp their decision... if the answer is yes then you are not speaking to the real decision maker (yet!).

Need

How much do they need this? How much pain are they in with the problem

that you could solve? What happens if they do nothing?

Time-frame

Does this fit my schedule? Is their time-frame realistic? You want it when?

There is also a more sophisticated system called SCOTSMAN, which stands for:

• Solution
• Competition
• Originality
• Time-scales
• Money
• Authority
• Need. 

This can be useful where you have complex or very time-consuming sales cycles and your cost of (attempted) sales is high.

In my experience, one of the main differences between the most productive salespeople and average salespeople is that the most successful are better at qualification, so spend their time where it is likely to produce the best results. They may well work less than some poorer performing sales people, but they work much smarter.

6. How much to charge?

Setting the right price can easily make the difference between a business succeeding or not, as a relatively small increase in price can make a dramatic difference to profitability.

Pricing and profitability is influenced by many factors such as supply and demand and competitive activity, but it is mainly 'perceived relative value' that counts. In other words, in the mind of the customer, does your offering represent better value than the alternatives that he is considering.

Often the best approach to maximise profitability is to look for niche markets, where your offering is of particularly high value to a specific group of customers.

Your ability to negotiate well will also make a big difference to the prices that you can command. The alternative is to compete all the time on just price, in which case you are selling a commodity.

Unless you are working with high-volume sales and can invest in technology to automate as much as possible, then commodity sales are unlikely to make you rich.

Author:  Bryan McCrae
Source:  The Marketing Donut