better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Simple Sales Tips

19 June 2016

Generating sales is often technically very easy. The hard part is finding the energy to keep going. In my experience, when working as a business coach, organisations who continue to grow and develop seem to have three things in common, that all support their sales process. These tend to be:

1. Strength in Depth. They have more than one person involved in the sales process. If we are working for ourselves then we always have to dig deep to find the energy to keep going. My tip here is to find a friend, a coach, a colleague or a PA to work with. Two heads are always better than one and it’s ok for us to be the primary sales person and for our supporter to sort back office sales admin and so lighten the load.

2. A Clear Process. We need to log all of our sales leads and manage their progress through the sales pipeline. A good tip is to map our process so that we have discrete stages to look at, such as: Initial contact > 1st meeting > 2nd meeting > product demonstration > quote > negotiation > final quote > ask for the order. We can then see who needs to be nudged onto the next stage.

3. Proactive Marketing Effort. People need to know we exist and it might take 7 attempts for them to hear our message, so we need to network, blog, tweet, leaflet, email and so on to give ourselves the best chance of being noticed. These mythical 7 attempts might span a year or more and so we can never be sure which bit is working for us. We just need the confidence to continue and the tip here is – do something each week to get our message out.

Remember, for sales success: Proactive Effort + Good Process = Positive Outcomes.

These three key elements apply equally for any size of business, whether we are a sole trader or a large SME. We can all choose to be successful in sales. We don’t have to like having to sell, we don’t have to agree with all the options available to us (Twitter still baffles many people) …however, we can chose to understand what will help to make us successful.

Happy selling!

Next week: Beware The 24-Hour Email Trap