How to accelerate your sales growth
Introduction
It’s not often that we see an organisation’s strategic vision that doesn’t have some challenging projected sales growth in it. It’s great to have ambition, and setting a big target is a good way to encourage different thinking across the business.
Sales growth is usually the best way to make your business more profitable and more valuable, and staff love working for a successful business that is growing fast. Sales are the lifeblood of any business.
But having set the target, you now need to achieve it.
In your Envisioned Future, you will have identified where you expect your sales growth to come from, in terms of the balance between new and existing customers and products. It’s always easier to sell to existing customers, especially when you are delivering reliably for them, but you are likely to need new customers too, if you really plan to hit that target. In this post, we will focus mainly on new customers, but we will come back to how to get the most from existing customers in the future.
You should also have defined how you want to compete – the areas of your offer that differentiate you from your competition. This needs to be boiled down into a simple clear message to take to the market.
If you continue doing what you have always done in the past, you won’t see the acceleration in sales that you need. To actually achieve the hockey stick, you need to take a structured approach to sales. We call this ‘building the sales engine’.
There used to be a clear dividing line between marketing and sales. With the rise of the internet, that line has become blurred; our sales engine needs to cover both. Rather than sales and marketing, it’s now more constructive to think of lead generation feeding into a structured sales process. The output of lead generation is someone with a level of interest in your product or service. Your sales process is the documented XOX process that you take leads – potential customers – through step by step, resulting in a sale.
Creating the sales engine – lead generation
All businesses generate leads, or else they wouldn’t exist. A powerful sales engine helps you increase the number and the quality of leads you generate, by imposing structure and focus, and by linking through to your strategic goals and your performance management system.
Use the EDIT model to think through how to build a great sales engine, starting with lead generation.
Firstly, explore the issues. What are you doing currently to generate leads? Which parts of this are working? Try to evaluate this financially. What issues are you encountering? What’s holding back your lead generation? Is your message getting through? Is it clear enough? Which channels and verticals are responding to you? Why? Are you sufficiently differentiated in the market?
Having identified all the issues, decide which are the key ones.
Then identify options that will resolve these issues. There is an almost infinite number of ways to generate leads. These include traditional marketing, such as advertising, sampling and PR, but also digital marketing, such as Search Engine Optimisation, email marketing, Google Ads, reviews and organic and paid social media. Other techniques to generate leads include cold-calling, networking, contact marketing and public speaking; the list goes on and on. Bringing the external agencies that you use into this process is a great way to create a wider range of ideas.
Lead generation activities can fall broadly into two types: building awareness, and driving sales. As a CEO, you need to make sure that you have the right mix, and generally, you are more interested in the ones that demonstrably grow sales. Of course, many activities will do both, but it is generally easier (and less tangible) to build awareness than grow sales, so watch out for an imbalance here.
Decide which lead generation approaches you will use, and which messages you will use in them. All approaches have their pros and cons, situations where they make sense and where they don’t, and you won’t have enough resources to do all of them. Identify all approaches that might work for you, and prioritise them using key constraints in your business (e.g time, speed, cost, expertise).
It’s dangerous to rely on just one or two ways to create leads; you want to create a V6 engine, not a two-stroke.
For each activity, assign a target of new business for it to generate in the year. Define your target to avoid confusion between the annual value of a new win, and what the win will deliver this financial year. Both are important to track, one to deliver your numbers this year, the other to achieve your strategy. Give each activity an owner, tasked with delivering the target. Create a clear action plan that covers all activity. Find a way to illustrate what your are doing, so all your people can understand and help.
Hopefully you can see immediately how this slots straight into your annual business plan, and from there flows into individual objectives to make sure it all gets done.
And make sure your targets increase each year. There is a wealth of data available to help you improve the effectiveness of what you are doing, especially with your online activity. Use it to make incremental improvements, refining your message and how you are delivering it.
Creating the sales engine – converting leads
You should now have a steady stream of leads. But how efficiently do you convert leads into sales? If you can improve the efficiency of conversion, you can have a dramatic impact on your turnover. It also improves the return on your lead generation activities, allowing you a wider choice and giving you even more scope to grow sales.
You should have already mapped out how you convert leads into sales as an XOX process. The elements of a sales process vary hugely from business to business, but the outcome is always to maximise profitable sales. Let’s now take this a step or two further, linking it even more tightly into our strategic framework. Most businesses will also need a process to win new businesses from existing customers. The following steps apply equally to both processes.
1) Your point of difference.
Does your sales process reflect and reinforce how you want to compete? Remember that there are only a few ways to set yourself apart, but many different routes to get there.
Is your value proposition clear in your sales process? Are there opportunities to explain it to your customers?
Does your sale process (your first interaction with new customers) reflect your positioning? If you have chosen to be customer intimate, does your sales process result in you gaining a deep understanding of your customer? Does it also demonstrate how you treat your customers? Do they feel special going through the process? If you have chosen process excellence, how can your new business process show just how slick you can be?
For every step of your sales process, think of and document ways to showcase your positioning and create a different experience for the customer.
2) Get the details right
Pay attention to detail. If customers visit your premises, plot their journey from the road outside to the meeting room. What they see on the way, consciously or subliminally, will impact how they feel about you. Make sure they see what you want them to – display any awards you have won, or great ways you treat your staff. The same applies to your website and any other marketing material you may have.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Beg, borrow and steal from anyone you think does this well. Look at industries outside your own for inspiration. How would McDonalds do this? How would Amazon?
3) Get the people right
Are the right people operating your process? How do they perform against the 5 critical success factors you identified for your sales team? Do you have the right balance between hunters and farmers? Do you have the right level of seniority? When should the Sales Director get involved? When should the CEO get involved?
Are their skills up to date? When did they last have sales training? Negotiation training? We all slip out of the good habits we used to have…
4) Measure.
Picture your process as a classic sales funnel and gather key data. For each lead that enters the funnel, identify its source, value, how far it got to in the funnel, and when it took each step. A lot of CRM programmes will do much of this for you.
Large parts of your process (or even all of it for e-commerce businesses) may be automated. This is great if it fits with your strategic positioning. The same rules apply here – measure every step.
5) Analyse.
Where do customers fall out of your process? Which steps do you need to focus on for improvement?
As you gather more data, look at it in greater detail. Analyse by lead source: do Google Ads-generated leads perform worse than ones you met out networking? How does the cost of each lead source stack up against the return? Analyse by lead size: are you more likely to win a smaller lead or a bigger one? Analyse by salesperson: who in your sales team performs best? What can others learn from what they do?
6) Optimise.
The analysis will identify areas for you to look at in greater detail. The EDIT model is a good approach to make improvements. Ensure you add these actions to your action plan.
Set numerical targets for each stage of the process. Will your action plan achieve these targets? How many leads will you need to deliver your sales targets? What else do you need to be doing? Think like a scientist and run deliberate experiments to test whether approach 1 performs better or worse than approach 2. Some of the best online companies perform thousands of these experiments each year.
If your sales process is time-intensive and expensive to run, make sure that the wrong customers drop out early. For instance, if price is an area which can put customers off, drop some price anchors in Step 1, and watch their reaction. That will weed out customers who won’t pay your price, whilst also prepare other customers for what you will charge them.
7) Focus.
How much time do you personally give to sales? Remember that everything you do sends messages to the business. What about your senior team? The whole business?
There is always a danger when you have a sales team that the rest of the business heaves a sigh of relief, and sees new business as someone else’s problem. In the best businesses, sales is everyone’s problem. Think carefully about who you could give sales targets to, outside of the sales team. Technical people can be great sales winners (especially from existing customers) but are often petrified of the S word. Tell them to fix customers problems (and charge for it) instead.
Discuss sales achieved and forecast for the month in your weekly Pulse meetings. Are you on track for your targets? Do you need to take remedial action?
8) Celebrate
Celebrating wins reminds people how important sales are, and can also motivate staff and reinforce your culture. We don’t mean bonuses by this; we mean public praise for the individual or team involved, and a shared experience for the whole business. It could be cakes in the office, or drinks after work; find something that fits your Values.
Conclusion
A powerful sales engine is a huge asset to any business. Not only can it help you deliver your strategic goals, but it can also allow you to make your numbers in the short term. Just imagine being able to turn on more sales whenever you want!
We’d love to hear how you have built your sales engine. What’s worked for you? How have you celebrated?! Let us know!
Next time, we will be discussing how to become a top 2% leader…
igesia Consulting helps businesses and the people in them to become peak performing. We understand what the very best organisations do, and work with companies like yours to give you the skills, plans and structures to do the same.
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