I have spent over twenty fives years selling and helping sales teams achieve their goals and objectives. In the current economic climate it's never been so tough to stand out from your competitors and really drive sales achievement through.
However, there are still some fundamental techniques that you should be using.
The following 5 ideas are ways your sales team can not merely survive, but actually grow during 2012.
- Increasing your advertising and marketing budget.
- Utilising the power of leverage.
- Focusing your efforts where they’ll are most useful.
- Correctly training your employees.
- Supplying excellent customer service and
1. The first point I made is to actual increase your marketing budget. What seem strange to me, it that most companies in a recession reduce or even stop their marketing spend. Yet, it is at this very moment you need to win hearts and minds of prospects.
You need to seen, be bold and creative. You need your products and services to stand out.
I have worked for too many companies who make this very mistake of considering their marketing an expense as an alternative to an investment and wind up destroying their business by cutting back in this region and losing market share.
2. The second thought is to use the energy of leverage by hiring a company to do your business prospecting. They are so many ways nowadays to prospect: Telemarketing, Email marketing, Social Media to name but a few. Where an outsourced company can help your business is through leverage their expertise in these fields.
No-one knows your business better than you and the same applies to leverage leads and prospect. This idea is linked to the first point. When times get tough, don't always turn to 'sharpening your pencil' as the right answer. Usual it is more to do with getting more customers.
3. If you have followed the two earlier points, you will be in a position now to concentrate your sales efforts where they matter the most, closing sales, seeing more customers, giving excellent customer services etc.
4. Training is a vital part of any sales function, creating the right sales structure and then making sure your sales team have the right skills for their job, selling.
5. Great customer service is what makes first time buyers, repeat customers. There is nothing more wasteful than having spent time, money and energy acquiring customers, only to lose them.
Invest time in understanding what your customers want and importantly how they see your services. And remember, you have two types of customers: internal and external.
Don't just get the opinion from outside your business, look inside to and ask them how they see your services levels. GO the extra mile, make customer feel special, but remember customer services isn't enough in 2012, you need customer experiences.
