Are you struggling with generating sales?
As a leader in your business some of the following might sound familiar:
- Sales volumes are inconsistent from month to month
- Writing lots of quotes / proposals, but still not getting the sales
- Having to re-write quotes / proposals several times is driving you crazy
- Too many prospects saying “not interested”, or “call me back in 6 months”
- Just not getting enough leads for generating sales
All of the above are symptoms that your Sales Process is not working properly.
Let’s start right there. Sales is a process. Surely you want a series of repeatable steps, where if you follow the steps, you improve your odds for generating sales sales.
In your business, surely you know the difference between a successful sale and a non-sale? So what happened in the successful sale, and how do we capitalise on that? Are you sabotaging your own sales? Had the experience where you thought to yourself “I should not have said that”, or “I should not have done that”?
How do you form good habits around the things that work in sales, and remove the behaviours / steps that cause you to fail in sales?
MIND SET
The road to success in sales in filled with obstacles, pitfalls, potholes, and landmines. Navigating through this is going to take an open mind. You are going to need to be open to learning and trying new ideas, and you are going to need to be resilient.
None of this is going to be easy for most entrepreneurs. It’s your business and your process. Accepting the need for change is the first hurdle. Consider engaging someone to work with you on understanding and challenging your current sales reality.
HERE ARE 10 FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO POOR SALES.
- Beliefs
What you believe about sales and selling is going to drive your behaviours and your success. The same applies to your sales team. Past success will shape your thinking: “This is the only thing that works”. You develop blinkers to any other strategy. Past failures contribute in a similar way: “I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work”. Have you considered that the failure might actually have been due to poor execution, lack of experience, or how many other factors?
- Not enough effort
Sales is hard work, and it’s a numbers game. The effort that you put in has to be in line with the results that you expect. If you do not have enough prospects being fed into your sales pipeline, you are just not going to achieve and sustain the sales.
You simply have to track and know your numbers. Know where the conversion is dropping and focus on that.
- Do not know your ideal client
The belief that anybody and everybody is your client [customer] is going to dilute the effectiveness of any of your marketing strategies. You cannot be all things to everyone. Your marketing message needs to be focused and it needs to talk to and resonate with your ideal client.
- No USP defined – point of differentiation
Far too many entrepreneurs rely too heavily on price, quality, and service as their differentiators. The challenge is that quality is often hard to measure or prove, and service is very subjective. Everyone can claim better quality and service, until they are proven right, or wrong. Invest more time in understanding and creating a strong Unique Selling Proposition.
- No defined steps in process
Sales is a process. You need to actively move a prospect from awareness to being a customer, and ultimately to being a raving fan. There are actions that can be taken at each step on this customer journey that will improve the likelihood of them taking the next step.
- Writing too many proposals and quotes
Writing proposals or quotes is both time consuming and costly. How often does it happen that after any pitch the first thing that your prospective customer says, is “send me a quote”. Not surprisingly, very few of these quotes ever turn into a job, and far too often the quote is re-written several times, and still goes nowhere. Ask more questions, write fewer quotes.
- Prospects not qualified
This is the link between not knowing your ideal customer and writing too many quotes. The prospect that you are talking to does not really have the need, inclination, or budget to buy your product or service. You are wasting time and money talking to un-qualified prospects.
- Order takers and not order makers
Sales staff are most often happy to take orders from willing customers, but are not prepared to, or not equipped to make orders. Taking orders is easy. Making orders requires understanding the customer, and their needs, and then crafting a solution that will make the customer take the next step.
- Passing over the failures
Failure is the point where we can learn the most, and yet we tend to brush it off, and just move on to the next customer. What we need to do is to go through the painful process of dissecting what happened in each step when we failed. If we can understand why we failed, we can find the opportunities for improvement. This is about unlocking the potential.
- Telling is not selling
The stereotype is that a good sales person likes talking. Given any opportunity to talk about the product or service, and you just cannot shut them up. It’s that feeling of being ‘railroaded’ or ‘smooth talked’ into making the purchase. The reality is that the best sales people are in fact good at asking questions, and listening, not telling.
Looking for better sales results, then think carefully about mapping out your existing process, looking for the gaps and opportunities. Not something that you have tackled before, then look for someone to assist you. A fresh set of eyes can be a very good thing to help you with generating sales.