Sales, sales and yet more sales……….PLEASE A simple innocuous request a month ago to a client of ours got me thinking! I had simply asked that at our next monthly meeting if they could give me a “Sales report” for the previous month. I did not think any more about it. When we came to that point in the meeting the following month, the report was produced!! Lo & behold I was presented with a list of all the beers that they had sold the previous month, a long list of different beers, in cask, keg, can etc. To them, sales simply meant the beer that they sold. To me it meant the outlet –Pub, Bar, retail etc. I believe this is a crucial tipping point for a brewery or any other business, when sales becomes about the outlets buying product or service and not simply about the amount you have sold! Knowing who bought and, equally importantly, why they bought can provide insights you can replicate elsewhere. For your Sales to fly, they have to be driven by metrics and … [Read more...]
Don’t Wait For Brexit Clarity – Get Exporting
Almost every business will be impacted by Brexit – positively or negatively. We can only make educated assumptions about what Brexit will look like and indeed when any transition arrangements may end. With a potential 2-year transition agreement, Brexit would happen in March 2021. Fortune favours the bold and businesses that can benefit from exporting should review their business strategy to achieve their maximum potential. If you don’t your competitors probably will. The good news is that there is a huge range of support available for businesses who want to start exporting or want to expand their exporting. When helping businesses review their strategy, I often ask if they export. The first answer is often no, followed by a, well we have sold this to here and that to there. They have become accidental exporters. If your business has recognised expertise or a niche specialisation then you will often be found globally via your web site even if … [Read more...]
5 Essential Sales Processes To Boost Your Business
Many small businesses fail to prosper because they don’t invest in developing repeatable processes and planning to help grow their sales. To follow are some essential sales activities to develop and repeat if you want to drive your business growth. 1- Develop a sales plan First and foremost, you need to answer the key sales questions regarding your business in a sales plan. What do you want to sell in the next 12 months How will that be split by month or quarter and over what distribution? What are the products or services that you anticipate selling? Who is going to be responsible for what in the sales plan? Then the softer more difficult issues Why will customers want to buy from you? How will you sell your product or service? Where and when will customers become aware of you? Where and when will they buy? And finally how much is it anticipated this will all cost? Once you’ve answered all of the … [Read more...]
5 Ways to Get Past the GateKeeper
New recruits making sales via ‘cold’ sales calls often struggle to take their generic sales training and put it into practice. If they are not trained professionally on how to make the pitch, they will lose calls and burn leads. Worse, they often make their company look bad if they managed to say where they are calling from before the callee hung up and won’t get a second chance for a while. Sometimes the caller may receive abuse, further reducing their will to make more calls, with their confidence dropping at an exponential rate. Here are 5 simple tips to helping your team get past the gatekeepers so they have a chance to convert to sales: Monitor the team, especially new recruits. Within days they may acquire bad habits that are hard to break, if left unchecked. You need to determine if they have an issue about making cold-calls, by listening and monitoring their behaviour whilst on the call: Train – Script – Monitor – Fine Tune – Interview – Retrain – … [Read more...]
