How you can see a sharp rise in sales

Mar 11 2010 by Richard Lane, The Journal

A SHARP focus on your company’s sales processes can lead to significant success that outweighs the extra effort.

Do you know why your clients buy from you? How about how they buy from you? I asked the same questions in this column back in January, from a planning perspective.

The purpose for re-visiting these fundamentals is that when you understand the answer to the above pivotal questions you can start to make sensible assumptions about your sales processes and therefore the strength of your pipeline.

I am lucky to be able to spend my time helping clients maximise the effectiveness of their sales people and their sales processes.

My Sales Process Review engagements are particularly exciting because of the rapid impact even small process improvements can deliver.

I love creating company-specific sales blueprints that an organisation can reuse to garner ongoing success in a simple, clear, concise and systematic way.

However, don’t just rely on my experiences. Research provides inspiring insight into how relatively small sales improvements, when leveraged to pull together, can deliver significant positive change.

For example, increasing performance by 10% in each of the following areas: (i) number of deals, (ii) value per deal, (iii) percentage close rate; and decreasing (iv) the length of your sales cycle by 10% can leverage a 48% increase in sales value. Multiple small improvements working together.

What can you do to find a few extra opportunities that will increase your sales pipeline by 10%? What questions can you ask to identify additional value that will help you increase your average order value by 10%? What can you do to close one more deal in every 10 opportunities that you work?

How can you sharpen your sales cycle to shave 10% from the time it takes to move from qualification to close?

Is your sales process working as effectively as it could be?

Make time with your team to brainstorm how you can create efficiencies and improve individual and team performance. Once you have identified how, put a plan in place to capture and measure your success.

Then let the power of multiplication work its magic.

Targeting the four areas described here you will help you to increase your sales revenues, and therefore your success.

Richard Lane is managing director of Morpeth-based sales improvement firm Engleby Associates