There are two approaches to sales:
1) systematic, regular, and self-correcting
2) not
Many businesses can get by without ever evaluating their sales efforts and developing a formal ongoing sales program. These businesses, however, can get rusty when current business is sufficient, and they miss out on the opportunity to improve sales programs over long periods of time.
The result is a business that is somewhat unprepared for tough times (when sales hustle is needed), and a sales team that is underdeveloped. A better approach is to maintain an ongoing sales pipeline. The flow can be increased or decreased as needed, but the important thing is to keep a formal structure in place that allows the sales team to stay sharp and keep improving in good times and bad.
That way, when you really need them (e.g. when a big client goes away unexpectedly), they’ll be ready. To help get your business on the right track, here’s a sample sales pipeline that’s easy to understand and implement:
Step One: Gather Leads
This can be done in a variety of ways. Some people rely on ads or their website to bring leads to them. Others do research to find prospects, or purchase lists for cold calling. And others use a simple tool like Bizness CRM that can find all the small business leads in a given area.
However you meet prospects, this is the starting point of your sales pipeline. Once you’ve got the contact info of a party that is interested (or may be interested) in your product or service, your sales team can take action.
Some owners might be saying, “Stop right there. I have enough business now. Why should I still be on the hunt?” Even if you don’t want to grow, you might be surprised what kind of business is out there. Every business can rank their current customers in terms of profitability or other characteristics. By prospecting, you may find better replacements for your least-favored customers, and improve profitability without having to grow at all.
Step Two: Follow Up and Close
Once you’ve got contact information, it’s time to reach out to your prospects. Whether you do this via email, phone, or in person, it’s important to take notes and keep a detailed schedule. A program like Bizness CRM can help you seamlessly select a prospect, reach out, take notes, schedule meetings, and collaborate across team members (noticing a pattern, yet?) That way, the ball never gets dropped, and everyone can keep tabs on evolving relationships.
Follow up regularly until you’ve got a response one way or the other. It’s important to keep active when pursuing a sale. Try not to irritate people too badly, though!
Step Three: Track and Analyze
This is where things get interesting. Your note taking and data gathering (you were using Bizness CRM to track everything, right?) can now reveal ways to improve. If your CRM tool has a report-generation function, you can easily understand your sales efforts at-a-glance. Now you know which types of customers to focus on, when to reach out to them, which sales angles were the most persuasive, what the most common objections were, and more.
Armed with powerful info like that, it’s easy to see what you need to change.
Step Four: Get Better
Now you can design some policies to help your sales team get better on the next go-round. Be sure to track key metrics like conversion rate so that you can compare from month-to-month and seller-to-seller. In time, you’ll see black-and-white improvements that will directly translate to more revenue and profit for your business.
Sound like a lot of work? It isn’t, if you have the right tool. You know where we’re going with this… we have just the right tool to help you implement a simple, cost-effective pipeline, and you can try it out for free to see just how powerful it is.
To learn more about Bizness CRM, click here!
