better business blog

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Systematic Sales Success

2 November 2014

Here are three useful questions for our next business review meeting:

1. Do we have a clear sales process?

2. Do we spend time auditing the process?

3. Does the audit create new actions for us to follow up?

Asking these questions will focus our thinking on an essential part of our business work – creating and maintaining a sales process. Sales work is not a random activity and is not something to shoe-horn into a quiet Friday afternoon. Instead we can build our way to success by creating a business process that captures leads at the top and funnels them down to confirmed sales at the bottom. All we need is a spreadsheet to capture possible clients and their details and then to allocate an action for each of them – we can spread the actions out over a couple of months so that we can manage a steady stream of work instead of facing a mountain (that we will put off until ‘tomorrow’).

Without a clear process to manage our sales work we risk having a random and haphazard approach that means opportunities are lost and potential clients allowed to drift away. Sales work takes time and diligence and although we don’t know who will turn into clients we can be sure that if we fill our sales funnel with enough leads and follow them up, some will turn into paying customers.

So this week, my invitation is for us all to collate a sales activity spreadsheet and diarise ten follow up actions for November. Sales work never stops and a little and often approach will bring us good results.

Next week: Three useful phrases