Setting your sales ecosystem strategies

Following on from our first article, we’ll go through some tips on how to make the sales ecosystem work for your business in this article. For now, ask yourself the following questions and you’ll get more out of reading on.

  • How many new prospective buyers did your company engage with last month?
  • How many of those were filtered in or out of the process?
  • Where are those prospective buyers now in terms of follow up and engagement?
  • How does your company take prospective buyers through the buying process?
  • Where in the process do most potential buyers drop out? Is that OK?
  • What are the (real) reasons some customers buy from you and some don’t?
  • What’s your company’s customer experience like? 
  • Are you happy with that?
  • How many customers come back again and again? How could you improve this?

Sales today is not about a superstar salesperson clocking up 100,000 miles a year as they make 10 repping visits a day and turn up at the office on a Friday to throw a pile of orders onto Admin’s desk.

Sales today is about the full ecosystem :  

  • generating leads (marketing)
  • converting them (sales)
  • getting repeat orders (account management)
  • selling a wider range (account management)
  • making money (commercial policy).

Often companies are really good at one or two aspects of this ecosystem but fall down on others. I’m sure you know of companies that are great at winning work because they’re really good at what they do but struggle because they don’t get in front of enough prospective buyers to build volume. Or how about the company with lots of volume, permanently busy but just can’t make money?

The trick is to get them working together.

The first place to start is to understand how well you’re doing in each of these areas. Measure activity and performance and assess – are you doing enough? Are you doing it well enough?

Then you can pick an area to improve. For example, if you have an 80% conversion rate but only generate a couple of leads every quarter, don’t focus on conversion, focus on getting more leads. If you have 100 leads a day coming in and a conversion rate of 0.1%, then don’t focus on leads – get better at converting them.

Once you’ve decided where you want to improve, you can set out strategies to make it happen. Some won’t work. Some will. So you need at least 5 strategies for each improvement area and you also need to measure which are the most effective. Once you know this, you can drop the ones that don’t work, refine the ones that do and then try other things in the space created by the ones that didn’t work. The trap to watch out for is failing to measure. Otherwise, how will you know which one strategy to double down on and which four strategies to drop?

When you get all aspects of the ecosystem working together, good things start to happen.

For example, what if you had enough repeat business to cover 80% to 100% of your overheads every month? How much more fun would sales (and all other aspects of your business) be? A pipe dream? Not at all. I know a number of businesses where this is the case. They worked out how to make the ecosystem work for them. 

Finally, I want to leave you with a few things you could try to get going. These are the single most significant things I’ve found most businesses don’t do that make the biggest difference in the shortest time. Simple, maybe, but how many of us can say we do these things properly, every time?

Some tips that make a massive difference (if you do them properly)

  • Marketing – Work out the profile of your best customers then target lookalikes.
  • Conversion – Follow up every quote / proposal within 24 – 48 working hours.
  • Repeat Sales – Stay in touch and invite them back.
  • Additional Sales – Tell every customer about everything that you do.
  • Making Money – Review your gross margins on every product / service you sell.

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We work with business owners and MD’s to help gain clarity on their sales strategy and more. If you’re struggling with where to start, why not schedule a conversation with us? It’s free and at the very least you’ll come away with a couple of ideas to help you move forward.

Alternatively come along to one of our upcoming business masterclasses –  Upcoming Events