More Sales Part 1

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In business there’s an old saying “There are only two ways to increase profitability, you can either cut costs or increase revenue”.

When it comes to increasing revenue I have found there are four simple and effective approaches:

  1. Find more opportunities
  2. Increase the number of opportunities you win
  3. Increase the size of your deals
  4. Shorten the time it takes to close an opportunity.

Over the next three newsletters I will discuss simple ways to use these techniques to drive business growth, both in terms of market share and revenue.

How to find more opportunities

One of the most common methods for getting more sales is by creating more opportunities.

However, in a mature market it’s often difficult to achieve a significant increase in the number of sales without investing in additional resources.

Rather than focusing on additional resources here are my top seven techniques for finding more opportunities:

Be proactive in your business development.   Focus on your client’s business issues and go and talk to them about how you can help, rather than just waiting to be called.

  1.  Top accounts or clients should have an account plan.    This document should clearly identify your plan for that client over the next 12 to 18 month as well as targets and action points.
  1.  Keep a record of key contacts for current and prospective clients and jot down their responsibilities and business issues.  Then, align your offerings to meet them.
  2.  Leverage past successes, both with the client and the broader industry.   This will help you expand your engagement or sell a product that’s not currently being purchased.
  3.  Generate a value position and a case study for your offerings from your past successes.   You may also be able to use past successes to ask for referrals or as part of a targeted lead generation campaign.
  4.  Increase the amount of time you spend on business development.    It is important that you have a process in place to qualify leads early so that you do not waste valuable business development time on opportunities that you are unlikely to win. If you think the probability of winning is less than 40% then why are you pursuing it?
  5.  Invest in a quality marketing campaign.  Many small business owners don’t spend enough on marketing.   In a 2011 survey CMO Insights reported that SMEs spend, on average, approximately 10% of their overall budgets on marketing.   When you decide to invest in a marketing campaign make sure you have analytics in place to measure results and how much it cost you for each lead and sale.