Recently I was lucky enough to be asked to do a presentation for the brilliant Julie Meyer at her Entrepreneur Country Event.
The conference was all about growth acceleration and – forgive me for stating the bleeding obvious – but too often not focused upon. So I entitled my talk, “Sell More”. Too many people find too many excuses to do everything and anything but focus on selling during the sales hours of the day.
It is not simply a solution to say sell more, it will take focus, planning, organisation, a relentless determination, some sense of humour, perhaps a better rewards scheme, better targeting, and most often higher levels of leadership, internal training effort and momentum for all those involved in the sales offer.
Persistence pays, but you must also focus on those most likely to deliver the best profit for the least effort. Your messages must be original, memorable and engaging from the outset. You have to define a step by step strategy for the way your products should be sold and then preach it and live to constantly improve it. If you need to hire more sales people but they had better be hunters, who are notoriously difficult to recruit and harder to keep happy.
You should share successful results and momentum and you must relentlessly study the current customer demands and the service level improvements you will need to make to stay ahead of the game. You have to build a culture that the customer pays the wages.
Do not become so distant from the sales floor that you forget to listen directly to the customer yourself. Involve them in any innovation and development you plan. You must be the expert in your field, go beyond client expectations, but not so far as to waste profit. Be aware that on an international scale the challenges get even harder but are by no means impossible. The upsides for export selling could even include winter sun.
So the key points to remember are:- Visualise your strategy
Communicate it to your team
Be relentless in the growth expectations.
Get this lot right and you have a great chance of beating those that do not live, breath and maximize the sales hours of the day.