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How To Increase Sales Performance

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: Sales is actually a subset of the company's overall marketing effort - it's the primary tool through which a business finds its customers (just as Customer Service is the subset of marketing activities responsible for keeping those customers). When revenue lags, the marketing manager (or entrepreneur) has to look first at how to increase sales performance. And it turns out Sales has its own lesser-known set of 4-P fundamentals: Planning, Prospecting, Presenting, and Paperwork....

How To Increase Sales Performance

Take A Fresh Look At The Fundamental Four Ps Whether you manage a business unit or own your own business, revenue generation is a key concern, especially in tough economic times. At its most basic level, a business exists to find and keep customers, and troubled businesses can't be saved by cost-cutting alone. The business has to provide a compelling offering of high value to prospects, and must do a good job converting those prospects to customers. That's why Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service are so critical to a business' performance.

Often, those terms - Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service - are used somewhat interchangeably; but they're not the same thing. Marketing is the big picture of revenue generation, and is based on the fundamentals of "Four Ps" - Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. The company has to provide a good product that customers want. It must "place" the product within the customer's reach (this is really "Distribution," which doesn't start with "p" and therefore has been replaced by "Place" for ease of memory). The firm must be able to price its product reasonably, and it has to promote the offering through advertising and sales activity.

So Sales is actually a subset of the company's overall marketing effort - it's the primary tool through which a business finds its customers (just as Customer Service is the subset of marketing activities responsible for keeping those customers). When revenue lags, the marketing manager (or entrepreneur) has to look first at how to increase sales performance. And it turns out Sales has its own lesser-known set of 4-P fundamentals: Planning, Prospecting, Presenting, and Paperwork.

Planning - a shrewd sales manager will look at the entire selling process from the customer's perspective, and plan each step of the process in a way that maximizes assistance to the customer in making a buying decision. How does your typical customer want to first contact your offering? What are likely to be her first concerns? How can you answer his likely first questions? The selling process should be customer-oriented from beginning to end, and the customer's natural sales resistance should be anticipated and properly managed. For instance, when a new entrepreneur contacts me to start her own home-business, I know what her concerns will be an hour, a day, a week, and a month after she opens her doors, and have (somewhat through trial-and-error) bundled together a collection of solutions for all of those concerns at a highly compelling price. And I've learned how to "roll out" those solutions at the right time.

Prospecting - you need to have an abundance of "leads," or prospects, for your business. A strong home business needs to find at least 100 fresh prospects to talk to every week. (My assistants made almost twice that many calls yesterday alone.) When you operate from a scarcity of leads, you end up "chasing" your prospects, and nothing good can come of that. By contrast, when you operate with lead abundance, you can take your prospects through your selling system in a much more professional way, addressing their concerns on their schedule. People buy when they are ready, not when you are ready. And if you have lead abundance, you don't chase them... they chase you.

Presenting - here's where you lay out your offering for the prospect's consideration. But don't just "show up and throw up," hitting your prospect with a detailed description of every aspect of your offering. Instead, think through your presentation from the prospect's point of view... how does she benefit? Your offering has many "features," and each feature should bring at least two real "benefits" to a customer. So with any product, you have many features (and at least twice as many benefits) to discuss. A good presentation is not exhaustive, but selective. You pause often to check in with your prospect, asking questions, and finding out what really interests him (not you). Only in that way can you tailor your presentation not to help you sell, but to help your customer buy.

Paperwork - Like "Place" in the Four Ps of Marketing, "paperwork" is just a word used because it starts with "p." The actual fourth fundamental of selling is CLOSING. Your salespeople have to have skill in asking for the customer's decision. Good sellers know several different closing techniques (time-honored classics include offering a choice, asking directly, questioning to yes, and taking it away), and they know how to read the prospect to determine when to close and which technique to employ. For both presenting and closing, if it seems your people need to build skill, try some training sessions that feature role-playing.

Before you blame other factors when business is slow, take a fresh look at the fundamentals, and start with how to increase sales performance. Revitalizing your sales activity is usually the fastest way to revitalize your business.

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Article Tags: beginning sales tips, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, wealth building



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