I’ve spent years helping clients grow their business and helping them concentrate on profitable business growth.

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.

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