They often expect me to say, “more sales staff” or “increase your marketing” or “increase your sales activity.”

The truth is, you need to really look at your whole business and view it as a sales and marketing machine. That way you can implement processes that will peg the sales you’re getting now and enable you to refine those processes to increase your sales.

There are at least 10 steps to increasing your sales.

The 10 Steps To More Sales

Obviously you can have as many steps as you like to get a sale. What I’ve done is try to summarise the key ways of making sure you’re maximising your business’s efforts to get sales.

• 1) Create a business marketing strategy which covers the products you sell and the people you want to sell them to
• 2) Decide which companies, people, markets you want to sell to
• 3) Make sure your personality, ability, uniqueness appears in every communication you have with your market
• 4) make sure your web site works for you and not against you
• 5) When asked to meet prospects listen, listen again and then decide whether you can help them – do not simply sell because you’re there
  6) Implement a sales process with stages that can be measured or estimated
• 7) Testimonials, testimonials – get lots, get good ones, get them published
  Continue to build relationships with current clients
  9) Find out why previous clients left and (depending) get them back
  10) Sack customers you don’t want

Is it that simple? Yes and no…

If you truly want a bigger business you just have to take a step back and see what you’re doing now.

If you’re not getting the business growth you want there’s a good reason for it. Go through the 10 steps, preferably with someone who’s been used to doing exactly that.

When I talk to businesses the number one reason why these steps are rarely addressed is often time management. People cram so much into their day they don’t leave anything for improving their business, and their life!

After I deliver training on time management (see working as a project director paid off) companies really start to focus on what needs to be done and not just fire fighting all the time.

And there are two key questions that businesses ask me. Firstly small businesses often say, “would you agree that referrals are the best way of getting business?.”

And secondly, bigger businesses say , “how do we get more sales?”

Referrals Are The Way

My answer to smaller businesses is to agree that referrals are often the best way to get business. However, if they’re only using referrals to get business they’ll often take a long time to grow.

What’s happening is that they’re not using all the ways they could to get more sales. In addition they aren’t investing in the sales process. For example:

• a) they don’t get every referral they go for. Yet don’t know how to convert more of them.
• b) They don’t want to pay for a salesperson because they think it’s a real cost to the business
• c) they’re trying to justify their own lack of sales activity

Not Converting Sales

When businesses start their owners are usually the sale person. Sometimes they’re not the best sales person for their business. They don’t have the ability to close sales they know will benefit their prospect.

Lack of sales skills is one of the main reasons why so many small businesses go bust.

That’s why a business owner needs to get trained in selling. Once they’ve been trained they have a much better chance of closing deals more often.

Sales People Cost Too Much

Are you guilty of saying that sales people cost too much? Maybe you’ve recruited the wrong people? Just recruiting someone “to do sales” doesn’t work. It’s important that you recruit the right person who has the sales skills – and no I don’t mean the “gift of the gab.”

Check my other articles about recruiting superstar sales staff so you don’t end up with a sales dog or a sales wolf who really will simply cost you money.

Then once you’ve got a super sales person you’ll see that they bring in much more profit than they cost.

Even if you can’t afford to pay a salesperson yourself you can find a sales person to work on commission only. That means they only make money when you do, so there is no other cost.

Or you could share a sales person with another related business.

Lack Of Sales Activity

Lack of sales activity usually means you’ve little or no structured sales process. That means you’re not continually generating new leads. You’re not regularly moving prospects into your sales funnel and along your sales pipeline.

Often the reason for that is that your marketing is minimal because if you’re not an expert in marketing you don’t know what you could be doing, that’s not “the usual” in your industry or sector.

Often getting a session with a marketing expert will immediately highlight activities you can carry out for low, or no, cost to improve your lead generation and also improve the likelihood of closing the deal.

How Do We Get More Sales?

The $6million question is “how do we get more sales?” The answer is always do your homework, hone your marketing and increase your targeted sales activity.

Easily said you may think. So, I’ll go into more detail in a later (related) post that  explores exactly how you can get more of the right sales.

In fact now is the time that enables you to concentrate on polishing the way you do business so that you’re ready for the upturn. Don’t think there’ll ever be one? There always is…

Plus looking at ways you can improve your lead to order ratio and reduce your customer loss.

To help businesses I’d like to offer these 10 tips to continue to grow your business.

1. Stop working so hard on tactics, step back and look at your business strategically
2. Implement a joint venture partnership to access your particular prospects
3. Use the Windows of Opportunity matrix to see if there are products you believe your current clients need that they don’t yet get from you
4. Improve your current sales processes, do it for an hour every week, until it works brilliantly
5. Innovate to create new, or better products
6. Use strategic marketing to get your message to your key customers and prospects
7. Look at your whole business with your entire staff. Improve one process at a time
8. Manage your time more effectively (I’m currently writing a book on this as it’s a subject particularly close to my heart as an ex IT Project director!)
9. Institute regular weekly staff training, it doesn’t need to be for more than 60 minutes, but it does ensure your staff learn the best ways of doing their jobs
10. Look at the assistance you can get from government bodies (I’m currently going through accreditation as a Business Link supplier – I’ll let you know how I get on)

Above don’t let the fear the rest of our economy is showing affect your attitude. You need to be confident that your business will survive. Follow these tips and you’ve got a much better chance of doing that than people who don’t!

If you’ve got a particular low, or no cost, tactic or strategy you use let us know by making a comment.

This post goes through a 7 step process to get the best sales person you can get.

Step 1: Your Industry Is Different

Of course your industry is different. However sales is based on human psychology and relationships.

So understand that if you recruit a super star sales person they don’t need to have worked in your industry at all. Truly great salespeople can apply sales principles to any industry. So don’t limit yourself to sales people in your own sector or niche.

Some sectors, such as finance, do require sales people to have certification. However getting a great salesperson means you seriously need to consider whether you’re willing to train them to get their certification.

Step 2: Advertise The Right Way

Too many sales recruitment adverts are all about the job, very little about the sort of person they want to recruit.

Your advert needs to stand out, capture the attention of the best sales people and to challenge them to apply for the job. At the same time you want to use the advert to frighten (yes I mean frighten) the people who think they "might be OK at sales", or "I usually make my figures."

Your advert needs to go into the best media to capture the type of sales people you want.

Step 3: Give Sales Spiel Short Shrift

Make sure the advert asks them to ring so you can talk to them before revealing further details about the sales job.

Again, use a short phone interview process, that challenges their ability as a sales person. Break into their sales spiel about how great they are, make sure they sell themselves to you. Ruthlessly get rid of people who obviously aren’t sales superstars. Those that are make sure that you interview them quickly (within a week). Otherwise they’re off with another company – if they’re looking you’re not likely to be the only iron in their fire.

Step 4: Conduct A Psychological-based Interview

Use a structured interview that you ask all the candidates the same questions. I use a pre-formatted series of questions that experience has shown brings out the best (and worst) during interviews.

A psychological-based interview is used to understand the attitudes a person has and brings to their work. These sorts of attitudes are reflected in their childhood and their experience in the job market so be aware that the best sales people can have very unusual CVs.

Also make sure your prospective sales person can mark themselves against a series of sales abilities you know every sales person needs.

Finally make sure they can really sell themselves to you before you even consider short-listing them.

Step 5: Perform A Sales Profile Test

It’s always important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of any candidate. If you’re convinced they’re a strong contender it’s useful to ask them to take a sales profile test. I use one that’s been tried and tested to find hundreds of great sales people.

The reason for the test is not to second guess what you’ve found out during the interview. It’s more about confirming what you’ve found. identifying strengths to build on and weaknesses to be aware of and to counteract.

Step 6: Decide Fast Slowly

Like I said before once a great sales person starts looking for a job they have any number of opportunities to go and work for companies. So if you’re sure they’re for you offer them the job as soon as is practicable, and of course you should make it dependent on references.

That said don’t offer it so quickly that you don’t check what they’ve said or thought about their answers, or considered their profile.

And always make sure that you ask for and take up references. Check the reality of the CV with the referee and also ask about some of the attitudes your interview and the profile has revealed.

Step 7: Hire Slow, Fire Fast

I don’t mean make the hire decision slowly. I do mean make sure you go through every step of your sales recruitment process properly. Don’t be tempted to jump to the job offer after the first 15 minutes of the interview!

Then once they’re in place. Make sure that they understand your industry, what you’re selling, your key competitors, your current customers and where you’d like to sell more.

Then monitor their sales activity. Be aware of their weaknesses but don’t harp on about them.

If they don’t start bringing sales in, ask yourself the reasons. If they’re outside of the sales person’s control work to remove them. If they’re in their control work with them to remove them. Finally if they just don’t perform for you get rid of them.

Keeping on a salesperson who doesn’t bring in sales is rather like having your brakes on when you’re going uphill in your car. The likelihood of getting to the top of the hill is nil. And in fact with the brakes on the rest of the car is more likely to go straight back down the hill!

And of course we all probably know people who represent that particular image very well.

But we still need sales people to bring in sales, or your company withers and dies.

However, the best sales people aren’t like that.

So employing someone who is like that is doing your business a distinct disservice.

After all, do you want to be known as the company shark who preys on their customers?

There are 3 distinct problems with sales recruitment that I’ve seen.

They’re Just Like Me!

Recruiting someone because they’re like you is dangerous.

If you’re the business owner you’ve a vested interest in making sure your baby survives and thrives and you’ll do whatever it takes to make a sale. Someone else who maybe is rather like you doesn’t have your incentive (after all to them it’s a job) and they wont go that extra mile, they wont get up that half an hour early or go and see that troublesome client and sort out their issue for them.

Maybe, they want to run their own business (sound familiar?) and the job they’ve got with you is a stop-gap until they find the business they want to run, or maybe copy yours if you’re successful!

They’re Great At Customer Service

Maybe you’ve come across someone in a shop or other business who really pulls out all the stops to make sure your order is sorted out completely to your satisfaction. Or perhaps its one of your own team who your customers keep praising as being fantastic to deal with?

The next logical step is to get those great relationship skills working for you as a sales person, right?

Wrong!

Admittedly star salespeople are great with their prospects and customers. However, it’s important they have some backbone so they don’t offer customers all sorts of freebies that are great for the customer but leave the company with a small margin on the sale.

Some "customer service" oriented sales people almost side with the customer against your company. "Yes, we shouldn’t have done that, I completely see your point, we’ll make sure that your order value is discounted." That’s not something you want to hear coming from a sales persons lips unless the company has made a major mistake!

They’re One Of My Friends or Relatives

When recruiting a sales person you always want to feel you know a great about them. Understand how they would react in a given sales situation. Forsee how their strengths can best be used.

The problem with recruiting your friends and relatives is that even though you know them well socially you don’t usually know them in a business setting.

They may work out fantastically, and I have seen that work sometimes…

More often if it’s a relative they can cause problems in the company by using your relationship to get priority treatment for their prospects, or to get staff to do work they wouldn’t do for another sales person.

And relatives, or friends, may turn out to be the most appalling salesperson you’ve ever seen once they get in to gear. Then what do you do?

Think about how your relationship changes if you fire them? How do you discipline one of your relatives? How will it affect your wider circle of friends and relatives if you do bite the bullet and "let go" someone who’s under performing?

Sales Recruitment: Aim At The Best You Can Get

Limiting your recruitment pool to friends, relatives or people you’ve met severely restricts your choice of sales person.

Recruiting people you know or already think are great means you’ll tend to view them in a rosy light (known psychologically as "the Halo Effect"). That means you’re more likely to see all the positive aspects to the interview you have with them and downplay the negative.

If you’re interested in getting the best possible sales person for your business (and no they don’t need to cost the Earth) you need to have a complete process and, preferably, a proven sales test.

In my next post I’ll go through the steps to recruit the best possible sales person for your business.

Having coached a great number of interim managers and business coaches I know that they’re a dedicated bunch! And the post about Mark reflects that. Mark’s biography is given at the end of the post.

This case study was provided by Impact Executives.

So without further ado…

Remploy Disability Sales Coaching

Remploy Managed Services called in an interim sales executive and coach to give impetus to a new venture.

Getting their foot in potential clients’ doors was not a problem that Remploy Managed Services faced when it was set up in 2003. Because the organisation ‘sells’ disabled people on a diversity agenda, most companies are receptive to approaches. “It’s a way of ticking the ‘diversity’ or ‘corporate social responsibility’ box,” says general manager Roy Easthope.

Unfortunately, however, as the organisation found to its cost, just because prospects don’t tell you to “get lost” doesn’t mean that they are genuinely interested. “You get lots of procrastination before you realise that most companies just don’t understand the inherent benefits,” says Easthope.

Who Are Remploy?

Remploy, a not-for-profit organisation, is the largest employer of physically and mentally disabled people in Europe. It employs around half of its 11,000 employees in the UK in its own factories, assembling goods from circuit boards to furniture and toys for customers who include car manufacturers, hospitals, schools and pharmaceuticals companies. The remainder of its staff work in many of Britain’s best-known companies.

Remploy Managed Services was established to increase the employment opportunities of disabled people by providing fully supported and managed teams of Remploy employees to work at clients’ sites. It applied this outsourcing proposition first to the monitoring of town centre CCTV systems, and became market leader in less than two years by changing the rules in the sector to provide better career development for workers and thereby increasing overall operating performance.

It then turned its attention to industry growth areas such as distribution, food and drink, where market tests had indicated considerable labour problems such as high absenteeism, high staff turnover, poor performance and low morale. Remploy knew it could help organisations reduce such problems, while at the same time providing employment opportunities for disabled people, and to this end it developed its ‘Enterprise’ proposition and formed a business development team to take it to market.

Sales Expertise Less Than Required

The proposition seemed persuasive. As Mark Linnell, the Impact Executives interim Easthope recruited in May 2004 to give structure and added momentum to the initiative, puts it: “Why wouldn’t a company like Next, for instance, take on five to ten people who are fully supported and managed, without incurring any recruitment or selection costs, and at no risk to themselves?”

But early progress was slow, and Easthope admits: “We probably focused so much of our energy and activity on setting the business up and developing the proposition that we failed to address the issue of whether or not we had the appropriate level of sales expertise.”

But with a hungry board, they couldn’t afford to sit around, and as Remploy was already a sophisticated user of interim executive expertise, Easthope had no hesitation in contacting Impact Executives who fielded Linnell, a sales and business development expert-cum-executive coach, to help the organisation “shorten its learning curve,” as Easthope puts it.

Killing The Time Wasters

Linnell first helped the business development team hone the unique selling proposition of Remploy Managed Services and refined the sales process accordingly. One of his first objectives was to help devise a system that actively disqualified the time wasters. He then worked on his own for three months as a ‘super sub’, to prove to Easthope that the concept worked, and developed several new contracts in the first three months.

Linnell then began to coach the three sales people – or business development managers. “I encouraged them to work at this as though it were their own business, because without that they would not have been hungry enough to be successful,” says Linnell. “They have moved from a position where they were having six or eight meetings a month to arranging 20 meetings a month. They also ensure they talk to the person with the key decision-making authority, and that that person demonstrably needs, wants and can afford what Remploy Managed Services is offering. Finally, they are only writing proposals for companies that want the proposition, because they have disqualified the companies that can’t do business with us now. And the results are coming through.”

Getting The Right Sales “Leadership”

Linnell has also helped the team identify and recruit a senior business development manager (“they need leadership, not management,” he says) who will focus on building the national accounts base and lead by example as he builds his own business. He has also coached the new recruit into his role.

“By acting as an honest objective broker Mark was able to upskill the sales force far more effectively through coaching than any sheep-dip-type training courses could have done,” says Easthope. But he claims the coaching has been “200% more effective” as a result of Linnell’s having proved that the concept sells. “When a guru is seen to get his hands dirty, that is a very powerful motivator,” he concludes.

Mark’s Background

50 year-old Mark Linnell has worked as an interim for several years and is currently on his fourth assignment with Impact Executives.

He trained as a soldier before moving into the wholesale and retail food sectors with 7-Eleven and then Wal-Mart’s food wholesaler, becoming sales director of Wal-Mart wholesale company McLane & Co in the UK. He then set up his own sales consultancy that brokered strategic alliances. His clients included Marsh, de Vere & Partners, Securicor, Siemens, Exel Logistics, Hays, Conoco, Statoil, Q8 and Budgens. A growing interest in sales led him to offer specialist sales and sales coaching consultancy as an interim manager and coach.

When you apply this to business you can see how much sense it makes.

I’ve coached company owners who keep doing what they’ve always done. And often the reason they continue to do the same thing is fear.

Fear that if they stop doing what they’re doing the sales they have will slip away.

One client I worked with had always cold called prospects. He’d always called them and he expected his sales team to do the same. It was hard work and the amount of sales they had was pathetic. And yet it was a good quality business.

I asked whether they had any other strategy for getting sales. I was met with a blank look and he said we do get some referrals.

When I asked what they did to encourage referrals I was told they did nothing.

After I’d gone into detail in their business it was obvious that they had a service that other companies could offer to their own clients. They’d never even tried direct mail, email or any form of advertising, other than a bad Yellow Pages ad.

If each of those different strategies could provide targeted leads for sales. The sales people wouldn’t need to make so many cold calls and could spend more time converting sales. Thus increasing sales, using sales people more effectively and having less stress from the regular cycle of frantic calls followed by sales visits when few cold calls were made.

However, the owner refused to try any new strategy to get new sales. He wanted to continue with the one he knew and felt comfortable with. He knew what he’d get and yet by not testing other approaches he was simply making life hard for himself and his sales team. And he lived on a profits knife edge, any drop in sales had the power to take him into the red within a couple of months.

Was he insane?

The only problem with useless sales people is they squander the leads you provide. And worse they can badly affect your standing in your market. So commission only rubbish sales people are not a good thing.

Most amazingly of all there’s a way of getting the best sales people to work for you.

And what’s so incredible is that so few business people bother to try and get the best.

I wrote an article for offline business newspaper Good Company where I interviewed David Speakman.  In it he noted that he’d adopted a rule that a bouncer at one of his restaurants had. The rule was “If you don’t let them in you don’t have to throw them out.” Which meant if you don’t let the likely troublemakers in you wont need to wade into a fight to get them out.

Applying that to a sales situation is simple. Don’t employ average sales people, apart from getting average results, I can almost guarantee you’re leaving money on the table.

Have you heard any of these reasons why the average sales person doesn’t get business:

• We’re too expensive
• Our discounts weren’t enough
• It wasn’t the right time, they said come back in ‘x’ weeks/months/next year 
• They don’t have the budget
• We’ve features we need to add to get the business
• We just missed out to another company
• They already have a relationship with another company

Guess what?

Everyone of these is an excuse.

A super sales person will not use those excuses. They’ll go out and get the business, because that’s the way they’re built.

I’m currently in the process of interviewing 9 potential ultimate performance sales people for a client.

And it’s fun to meet these people. They often have an interesting life and their sales reflect their awesome ability, so choosing between them becomes a very interesting challenge.

In a future post I’ll explain how an ultimate sales warrior is made and how to recognise one. One thing you should know the companies that employ these people rarely realise and actually make them perform less than their capability.

If he can’t teach you anything about selling I’d be very, very surprised.

Normally I would have reviewed a book like this to see whether it’s any use, but …

I coach his clients in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

I’ve been in two minds whether to post this message because any review I do of his book would be biased. Just like I’d be hard pushed to give anything but glowing praise for his DVD business programmes.

Because I think they’re well done and anyone can learn from them.

The bonuses when you buy this book are amazing. Plus you get two coaching sessions with his trained coaches. If you’re outside the USA you’ll get me. So you’ll be able to hear what I sound like and get some free focused advice for your business.

You need to buy the book and request your coaching quickly as the book was at number 1 at Amazon and I’m getting a lot of coachees! So many that I’m almost out of diary space.

By the way there’s no requirement to sign-up to coaching for life! But I do expect the commitment to action I normally get from my more usual clients.

Click on my affiliate link to get the book from Amazon (USA), or Amazon (UK).

Or simply go to your own favourite bookshop.

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