The sales and marketing area of your business is the part of your business that is responsible for finding clients, making sales, and generating revenue. This is the part of your business that makes it rain cash flow.
Too many entrepreneurs only focus on this area of their business because they have to, not because they want to. They are intimidated by the idea of selling. But understand this—in the early and middle stage Level Two of your business, it is crucial for you the company founder to focus a great deal of your attention and energy on generating profitable sales. If you don’t, your new business will not survive, let alone thrive. It is only as you grow your business that you can replace yourself from this area of your business. To do that, it becomes critical for you the business owner to create a profitable selling system.
In the earlier times of your business you need to make sure sales are happening. Often this will mean you will meet with clients and close deals to generate sales. Later however, your focus needs to shift to creating repeatable and scalable selling systems that aren’t dependent on key staff.
For example, imagine you have a new software start up. A lot of your early effort as the company founder will be in landing the key joint venture relationships with more established players in your industry to market through their client relationships and split the revenue. As your software company grows, rather than focus on going out to meet with new joint venture partners, you might instead focus on finding and hiring the talent to do that for your company. Later, you’ll focus on making sure your business is creating the systems that consistently find and hire new sales talent for your team.
Or imagine you have a contracting business. Early on you will meet with prospective clients to give them estimates and close sales. But this is only a Level Two solution. To create a Level Three business you need to build the system that generates those sales. This might mean creating the advertising systems to generate leads, hiring and training new estimators to go out on sales calls and generate business, and at some point hiring on a sales and marketing manager(s) to take over leadership of this area of your contracting business.
This focus on selling systems is crucial for you to build a Level Three business. Your selling systems include the following components:
· The marketing and lead generation systems to consistently generate the lead volume your business needs to generate sales.
· The lead conversion systems and team to consistently convert leads into thrilled clients.
· The tracking and reporting systems for you to reliably measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts so that you can optimize your selling systems over time.
Since many sales systems use live sales agents to close sales your system might also need to include the processes you use to find, hire, and train new sales agents. Not to mention the sales management processes you develop to lead, motivate, and grow your sales team over time.
The key is to build your sales systems to be independent of any key team members. There is a temptation to build your sales and marketing pillar of your business by relying on “superstars”. While it’s great to hire sales superstars, it is not a smart business move to have a company who is reliant on a key person who generates all the companies sales—whether this is you the business founder, or a sales person you hired in the second year of your business—unless you have dependable means of replacing your superstar if she decides to leave your business.
Instead you have to find ways to generate sales that aren’t dependent on your superstar. Or you need to develop a dependable system for finding, hiring, and training sales superstars, in which case your business is not dependent on any one superstar, but on the system that finds or creates these superstars.
One of the companies I built originally was dependent on me and my partner to generate all the sales. And sell we did. The two of use generated several million dollars of sales each year. But it required long hours and even worse, at least from my perspective, lots of travel. In those days I spent 10 days out of every month on the road selling and closing new business. I was making a lot of money, but this sure wasn’t the dream I had for myself.
Then we finally go smarter and began building the sales team and systems that didn’t need us to close sales. We built up our online sales to half a million per year. We built a network of independent sales reps who sold another $2-3 million per year. And we created a whole new selling channel with joint venture partners which generated several million dollars of annual sales for us which we split 50-50. All told it took us 36 months to build and optimize these selling systems. In the process we tripled our companies sales volume, and radically reduced our dependence on me and my partner to generate sales. Best of all I cut my travel time by over 300 percent!
None of this is easy, but the rewards are huge.
{ 0 comments… add one now }