Sales teams, a luxury or money well spent?

It can be very expensive to build your own sales team. However, sales are the lifeblood of any business. Without a successful sales organisation and sales performance, it is very difficult for a business to hit its profit targets.

They need to be well managed and focused on the right in the right areas. I still see businesses investing in sales teams but without a clear sales strategy or process to back it up.

To ensure your investment in your sales team is money well spent, ask yourself a few questions;

Are they focused on doing the right things?

Quite rightly and understandably, a lot of businesses spend time analysing sales performance; what has sold well, where are the shortfalls. They then look to re-focus and prioritise based on their findings.

These are obviously important tasks for any business to undertake, but they focus on the outcome of an activity and not on the activity itself.

Yes, it is important to measure your sales performance, but it is even more vital to understand the sales process itself as this creates the sales performance – nail the sales process and you can nail the numbers.

Do they understand our market and our customers?

Here are some simple questions you can ask them to help them understand more about the sales opportunities:

• What type of customer’s buy our products?
• Why do they buy our products?
• Which sales channels are they from?
• What does the sales pipeline look like?
• How do they hear about us?

How do we increase sales?

There are numerous ways of doing this, but having your sales team focus on and understand these will help.

• Identifying who buys from them will help identify other customers that look like them
• Understanding why people buy from us is vital, this can then be reflected in your sales material (digital and copy)
• Having identified the best sales channels, making sure that the sales team have a clear sales funnel in each channel that brings in new customers.
• Understanding the conversion rates of moving a prospect to become a new customer will help make sure we have enough customer contact.
• Ensure that there is a clear understanding of how long it takes to win a new customer.

Am I providing the right marketing collateral?

This is an important element of the sales process, they are your “silent salesperson” and include

• Sales presentations – focused on the needs of the customers and not the sales features
• Clear value propositions and ROI/case study data
• Competitor analyses and market research
• Technical datasheets
• Objection handling Q&A
• Pre and post-sales support

Once you have clearly worked through and understood these questions, you can move forward with more confidence and look at some of the “softer factors” such as getting them to want to do it – so they need to genuinely enjoy working for you and believe you are a good company that delivers for customers.

You have to show them it’s worthwhile – this could take the form of sales bonus schemes or incentives or by getting them excited about the growth of the business and what opportunities it might deliver for them.

In short, building some structure into the sales activity will deliver better results for you.

Our team at BHP Consulting have all successfully run businesses, and we understand that every business is unique. Our practical approach to supporting our clients enables us to share our real-world experience to positively impact on the performance of your business. To arrange a call or an exploratory face-to-face meeting, please click here.