Sales is the constraint to growth in small to mid-sized companies.
- You must determine what you are going to sell and what you are not going to sell. Determine where you are going to make your money (strategy).
- Put the 80/20 rule to your revenues to likely discover 80% of your business is coming from 20% of your customers, as well as 80% of your business coming from 20% of your products. Narrow the focus.
- Develop the ‘Ideal Client’ criteria. (Developing the marketing message.)
- Develop a plan to make more of it faster (get to market fastest way possible; channels, alliances, etc…).
- Develop a plan to sustain it (target market(s), competitive advantage, value proposition, channels to market, pricing strategy).
- Develop a sales process that ensures predictable results.
- Constantly innovate to stay in front of the pack.
- Develop an annual sales forecast from the ground up, identifying revenue streams, average sale price, and average number of sales to come up with an annual forecast.
- Assign accountability.
- Measure, review, revise, execute, repeat!
Services
Sales Organization Advisory Services
To identify the ideal client, develop the sales process and build sales plan and pricing strategies
Constraint for business growth today is not supply, it is the ability to get to market and maintain a competitive advantage.
Our client’s sales organization typically consists of the owner(s) and perhaps a few sales people. Most of the time, there is little predictability to their sales, and a real frustration from ownership about ‘why’ and ‘how’ can they increase sales.
Although it is vitally important for the owner to maintain contact with the customers (to understand needs, shifts in the market, etc…), it is just as vital to migrate customer relationships from the owner to others in the sales organization. A big value detractor is when the owner has all the customer relationships. From a buyer’s perspective, what’s left when the owner is gone?
Many sales organizations are built on a ‘wing and a prayer’. “If we just contact enough people, someone will buy.” This is a strategy that almost always leads to eventual failure. Because there is likely no differentiation or competitive advantage communicated in any sort of a value proposition, most sales turn into transactions, and transactions are almost always negotiated on price only. Competing on price is the beginning of the death spiral. Someone can always go lower, and each party does until someone can no longer sustain their business and ultimately goes under. You do not want to be here.
The 3-legged stool of sales:
Our Sales Organization Advisory Services focus on bringing some order to the chaos. We help identify the ‘Ideal Client’ profile based on criteria such as ease to work with, profitability potential, easy to find, and low support. We then build sales plans that describe the market, the value proposition, channels to market, a sales process, and a pricing strategy that makes sense. We work to establish the internal support necessary to maintain relationships. Finally, we help the owner assign accountability for results, and develop tools to measure those results.
At Compass Point, we love sales! We love helping companies with their sales challenges. Sales is the lifeblood of any organization. Great business models, products, and operations are nothing without sales. They all need to work in unison, but there is no business if there is no customer! Give us a call to help you build a sales organization that brings predictable results to your company.