Grow Your Sales ; Grow Your Business
In order to grow our businesses, we must understand our net profit. In all businesses it will not matter how much you grow your sales if your fixed and variable costs are too high.
Firstly, work out the net profit of each type of sale (even at a very high level) to understand which sales stream you should focus growing (i.e. THE most profitable one first).
The next point of focus is always SALES.
Without sales, it doesn’t matter how great your product or service or how busy you keep yourself; it will not succeed.
Therefore, the primary focus of everyone in your business needs to be sales and customer satisfaction.
Want to argue with me?
Excuses I hear a lot :
- I’m the business owner
- I don’t like the ‘sales’ focus
- I’m not a salesperson
- I’m better at developing the software
- I have people for that
Remember every customer you have will return (and bring referrals / friends) if they are treated well. If they like your product or service and remember it’s always about how someone is made ‘feel’ in every interaction with your company.
Therefore, if any one in your team (whether accounts or the cleaning staff) don’t look at customers the way your salespeople do and understand the value in every customer relationship, your business is not as successful as it could be.
What can you take from this to Grow Your Business?
Everyone should be focused on sales at least 80% of the time.
All of your staff should be trained like salespeople.
Do not think sales = selling. Believe it or not, relationship building, growing trust with customers, speaking with respect and understanding will help your people ‘sell’ more than a salesperson talking about the product detail to a potential customer.
Remember the phrase ‘How you made someone feel’ and not what you said… This is sales 1.01.
Don’t be afraid to talk sales with all your staff. Even the support staff who say ‘But I’m not in sales.’ Getting everyone in your business to understand relationships, networks and support structures will help Grow Your Business.
Give it a try and see what the bottom line looks like in 3 months’ time using this laser focus!
- If you’re interested in training staff, there are various training courses on sales techniques. One of my favourite presenters (who focuses on networks / trust / understanding what your customer wants in every interaction) is Jo Collins of Sales Performance.
- Jo is running a workshop ‘Improve your sales confidence with a master class in sales’ in November. – see here for the link
The magic always happens outside your comfort zone
Have a great week
Wendy
[29 October 2019]
