Re-energising your sales pipeline

Business owners and leaders are busy people. So, managing your time is a vital ingredient to being successful and developing your business.

If we were to observe you over a week, what would we find?

Would your activities reflect the priorities you have in your business?

One area that would probably have some focus would be sales., but in what sense?

Is your time in this area exclusively spent on servicing your customer’s needs today, or are you also horizon scanning and thinking about your sales pipeline for tomorrow?

Horizon scanning in your business per se is a vital part of your future success and needs to have regular focus and thought. It is equally important to think about your customers in a similar way. We often find it useful to work through a series of questions to address this.

Start with your existing customers:

• Look to understand who they are and why they buy from you.
• If you’re not sure why they buy from you, engage with them and ask them.
• You can also ask them if they know anyone else who might benefit from buying your product or service – referrals are a very important part of any sales pipeline.

Targeting new customers:

• Once you have identified who your customers are, develop a target list of businesses that appear to be similar to them. This will greatly increase your rate of conversion for your new business targets.
• Understanding why your customers buy should enable you to be very specific in your sales approach and to focus on the needs of your target customers. This simple approach will help you quickly create engagement and empathy.

Understanding the sales funnel:

• We often write about the importance of learning from our own experience and this is equally true in the case of sales.
• It is vital you measure your success, how many potential customers do you have to speak to, to gain one new order? How many calls do you have to make to gain one new appointment?
• This information will enable you to understand your sales funnel and will therefore build a sales process that is repeatable and measurable.

 

We have seen this simple approach work in numerous businesses. This principle works effectively in both a face to face and virtual world as you are focusing on the needs of the customer and not generically on your product or service.

It is about being smarter and making use of the information you already have to build a more robust and lucrative sales pipeline for tomorrow.

If you would like to understand more about how we can help you develop your sales pipeline please book your free follow up call here.

 

Our team at BHP Consulting all run successful businesses, we understand that businesses are unique and our approach involves sharing this experience to improve your business. For an initial telephone conversation or face-to-face meeting, click here