Summary
Growth in sales is essential. If you are not growing then you must be dying - that’s a fact of life. You need to develop a positive programme to seek out and generate new business opportunities. Pursue an effective telemarketing technique to develop new prospects.
Your products and services are good - the problem is where are your buyers? It is a matter of making sure that when the time to buy comes, prospects include you in the people they turn to.
Much of your business will come from referrals so you have to maximise the number of referrals to your business. You need to use your personal network so that as many people as possible know who you are, what you sell and where to find you.
You need to adopt a pre-call planning technique to save you both time and money. Do your homework and put yourself in control right at the start of the sales cycle.
Some customers may just want to walk in and make a purchase. You need to be as visible as possible to ensure it's your business that they walk into. This means advertising - not the big dollar spend in the media, but advertising yourself - you are the business. It means working on your company image. It means building a reputation for reliability and efficiency, and making sure you give the best after-sales service.
You cannot afford to sit back and wait for the sales to roll in, even if your reputation is impeccable and you have made yourself visible in the market place. You have to go out into the business world to make people aware of you and what you do.
Carefully identify selling possibilities, and then engage in pre-call planning and low-key awareness, making appointments with the people who make decisions about what is to be bought.
If you are personally known to the customer your chances of making the sale are greater. If your previous contact has left a favourable impression, your chances are even better. If you are known and trusted in the broader market place, you are really in there with a great chance of actually making the sale. The idea is to stop them ever getting as far as the internet or the yellow pages.
Here is a simple “Triple A” guide to business growth:
Awareness
The potential buyer has to know who you are and what you sell.
Accessibility
You have to be easy to find and easy to deal with. Some people are easy to find and hard to do business with. This does not mean, however, that you have to give away the shop either!
Approval
The approval of the individual buyer and the business community at large is the surest basis for continued growth. A good reputation is your most valuable asset.
Your business is like a garden. You have to keep working on it to make it grow. Sheer hard work is not enough. Good planning is essential if it's going to be really successful.
Good prospecting!
Part Ten - Prospecting for More Sales - To learn more about this author, visit Lawrence Atkinson's Website.
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Lawrence Atkinson
(Visit Lawrence's Website)
Lawrence specialises in sales training and
sales coaching, with over 20 years
experience as both a trainer and a coach.
He has lived and worked in the UK, Europe,
the Middle East and more recently the
Pacific Islands. He is a Fellow and
former Director of the Australian
Institute of Training and Development and
holds Fellowships with the Australian
Institute of Company Directors, the
Australian Institute of Management, and
the Financial Services Institute of
Australasia. He is also a Justice of the
Peace.
His many experiences in a variety of sales
situations present an interesting
background for his training and coaching
interventions and provide Lawrence with an
ability to relate to and train people at
all levels, across a variety of cultural
and industry settings. This includes, for
example, training and coaching business
owners and managers, senior relationship
managers, business banking managers,
financial advisers, retail sales people,
electrical sales engineers, accountants in
PNG, new Australian exporters, importers
and exporters in Fiji, and a video
production company in Bahrain!
A Rotarian and Paul Harris Fellow, he
loves to work with people to see them
succeed.
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