YOUR BUSINESS GROWTH DEPENDS ON YOUR ABILITY TO GET MORE customers. At the strategic level, getting more customers to buy from you is the best way to prove that your refined value proposition and new business model work. It is also the only proof that matters. With no customers, there is no income, and if there is no income, there is no business.
You have gone through the initial selling experience, with your early adopters, and achieved proof of concept. Based on these interactions and insights, you need to create a sales and marketing plan to drive growth.
UNDERSTANDIG SALES
AS I’VE ALREADY SAID, SALES PROVE THAT YOUR CONCEPT HAS ECONOMIC VALUE. To boost your sales, you might want to look at hiring one or more staff members to help you to sell and deliver even more of your product. You need to stretch your limits and there’s no better time to get going than right now! The core idea should be to replicate your previous sales success and, hopefully, to double, triple or significantly increase your sales figures.
Don’t fear hiring additional employees. Even if you don’t have previous management experience or the ability to manage a bigger team than the one you currently employ, you need to face up to the challenge at some stage if you’re truly committed to growing your business. Also, sales are a good area to expand from because the perceived expense of new sales staff is easily justifiable.
The more sales you make, the more capable you are of hiring additional staff members. Equally, if new staff can’t sell, in the way that you require, to get your business to this stage, this is a sign that something needs fixing in terms of how you are communicating your offering. You may well need to take a few steps back and re-look at your value proposition and business model.
Numerous resources are available to help you with this. This is both positive and negative. Yes, they offer a lot of help and insight, but you also need to be careful about making the whole thing too complex and involved. Always remember that sales rely on your repeating your success. You need to show staff that they can achieve by showing them exactly how you did it.
Don’t be shy! If you believe in your product or service, and you genuinely believe customers should buy it, selling is the only way to get them to buy it and benefit from it. Period. As an entrepreneur, if you can’t sell, your chances of success are severely limited!
Businesses fail because they don’t have enough customers buying their products. In the realm of small and medium businesses, this often happens because business leaders don’t know how to sell and, most often, this is because they don’t want to sell. How many times have you heard people say how much they hate selling? Well, the hard truth is that if you want to run a business, selling must be a fundamental part of your life.
WHAT SELLING ISN’T
SELLING IS NOT ‘SELLING OUT’ TO YOURPASSION. Getrid of the idea that selling your product or service means becoming a dishonest second-hand car or insurance salesperson. Replace these clichés with the understanding that a refusal to sell could well be the biggest obstacle to success you will face.
Emotionally, you don’t want to be seen as the salesperson that pushes someone into a corner and forces them into purchasing something they don’t want to buy. The truth is that, while most people struggle with being ‘sold to’, they also love to buy. Why do we love to buy? Because we have problems that we need to solve.
When you sell a product, you are offering customers a solution to a problem. And they, much like you, will welcome a great solution that makes their life and/or work easier.
WHY NOT LEARN TO SELL BETTER?
SO WHY NOT DO IT BETTER? Why not learn the science, the art and the tricks of the trade, to make our lives better and not have to continue battling with the idea of sales on a daily basis? The truth is that I’ve seen sales become a life-changer for most people who’ve never seen themselves as salespeople. Selling and advanced concepts such as negotiation and deal-making, are truly important in life, generally.
We sell from the moment we wake up every day. We are selling to ourselves to get up and get going with whatever needs our attention on that day. As we go on with the day, we are continuously convincing others, negotiating and sometimes begging (another form of selling) them to do what we need them to do.
SELLING IS NOT A ‘SALES PITCH’
MANY ENTREPRENEURS AND SMALL BUSINES MANAGERS DON’T LIKE THE IDEA OF linking an
explanation of what their business is about to a “sales pitch”. Their thinking seems to be quite emotional. We tend to see salespeople as those who sell “other people’s stuff”. People who will sell anything, to anyone. The joke about selling ice to eskimos captures this emotion. This, we believe, is not positive – the ability to sell anything to anyone at any time.
Entrepreneurs see themselves as creators, not sellers of stuff. Therefore, a “sales pitch” is something that “other people do”.
This is simply not true! Here are the harsh truths about sales:
Your product will not sell itself (no matter how great it is)
Entrepreneurs often believe their “stuff” is the best thing since sliced bread. It is logical then, that they won’t need to convince anyone to buy it. Customers will come pouring through the door. Did you know that even the inventor of sliced bread had to sell the concept hard, for years, before the market accepted it as a part of everyday life?
Sales isn’t demeaning (unless you make it this way)
A lot of people see sales as being pushy, manipulative, and even pretentious. They don’t want to sell and be associated with bimbos!
This is seriously misguided thinking. Sales is about creating a purposeful business relationship. There’s nothing demeaning in convincing someone to pay you to do something. In truth, when you think about it, this is an essential human process – a process that links clients’ needs to a solution. Selling is the process of eithersolving a problem or taking advantage of an opportunity. Either way, it plays a vital role in helping people deal with the tricky business of being alive, and that’s a positive thing.
Zig Ziglar is quoted as saying: “If you want to be successful, all you have to do is help enough people to get what they want.”
I see sales and selling as the process of helping people get what they want – and need – to be successful. When I see or hear people loading the sales process with emotion, my conclusion is that the individual concerned is in fact loaded with emotion and doesn’t know what to do with their natural anxiety. So, they blame the sales process. They make sales emotional.
Sales is not the unknown
Too many people write off even trying their hand at selling because they’ve never done it before. This is illogical. Many of the best things in life are initially alien and unfamiliar. Riding a bike. Driving a car. Your first kiss. Your first job. Your first child. Fear of the unknown is actually an excuse for not taking action. It’s as simple as that.
Sales is not the sum of your small fears
Yes, you have many small fears. Yes, it feels like sales encapsulate all those fears. But be careful of this state of fear, because it could easily be laziness in disguise. Let’s break down some of the most commonly expressed fears – the things I hear when talking to people about sales:
YOU GREW UP BEING TOLD NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS!
Nowyou must do what mom warned you against. Ok, I concede that, for some people, the kind of social environment that involves meeting new people all the time can be stressful. But, if you are this type of person, then you
NOTES need to accept that entrepreneurial business might not be for you. It’s not just sales; you may need to reconsider the whole thing. For everyone else, especially those who enjoy the networking sessions and conferences, these strangers you fear so much are the very same friends you enjoy meeting in a different context.
I know a lot of people who would rather die than speak in public. To my mind, this is related to fear of strangers. I accept that, for a certain percentage of the population, public speaking is too stressful to even consider. But, for the majority of us, this fear is an illusion. You need to become familiar with speaking in public and you can only do that through practice. With enough practice, the fear fades away.
This fear may be more deeply rooted and complicated than we might think. Selling can be difficult because rejection makes you feel compromised and uncomfortable. No-one likes to be rejected and, in sales, you are rejected more than you are able to close deals, especially in the beginning.
It’s important to recognize that most people experience the same emotion and that there’s nothing wrong with it. Of course, with time and experience, rejection can become a more manageable part of the broader process of selling. The trick here is to recognize, before you even start, that this emotion is going to be part of the mix. It’s much easier to deal with negative emotions if you identify them as part of a logical process than if you try to pretend that they don’t exist.
THE KEYS TO EFFECTIVE SELLING
“SALES IS THE HARDEST LOWEST PAYING JOB and the easiesthighest paying job”. It’s all about how you see it.
I am not sure who said these words, but this is one of my favorite sales quotes because it highlights just how much of sales is a mental attitude. As with most challenges of a mental nature, the key is to find a process that you can repeat again and again. The more you repeat it, the easier the mental challenge becomes.
After you have defined your value proposition and tested it in the market,here are some of the high-level process steps you need to follow:
Most companies will need to engage in marketing and sales throughout their existence. The two areas areclosely related, but they are not the same thing.
Marketing is an activity that seeks to raise general awareness of a company in society and the marketplace. Sales is an activity that brings revenue into the business through the sale of products. Marketing only helps you to sell. It is not the process of selling, as such. Marketing is used to identify the prospect, while sales is used to convert the prospect into a customer.
Historically, marketing has been expensive. Many entrepreneurs have lacked the budget to do effective marketing, but this has changed with the advent of social media.
The bottom line is this: a company can prosper with limited or low-level marketing, but it cannot survive with limited or low sales. Equally, it doesn’t matter how strong your marketing is, you still need to have an effective sales process in place in order to convert the leads coming from marketing into revenue, via closed sales. You need to sell, or all your marketing will be a waste.
