ChristianWhen I talk to business owners such as yourself, without a doubt, the number one thing you tell me when I ask “How’s business?” is:
“I need more sales…”
So…
I decided to take that sentence apart and break it down into its core components.
Once we start talking about getting new sales, this is when a flurry of questions start to evolve, such as:
- I’m not a sales person, and it’s awkward to ask for a sales, so where do I start?
- 90% of my business is referrals, how do I get more?
- There’s so much information out there, what’s real?
- What do i focus on?
- What should I say?
- What medium should I use to let others find me (calls, email, social, etc)?How often should I be communicating with my prospects?
- How do I find more time in my day to grow my business since I’m spending most of my day with my current clients?
- On and on…
There’s a long and short answer to the question of “how to get more sales”.
First, what is a sale?
Seem’s obvious enough.
A sale is a value exchange.
Usually it goes like this, “You give me X result and I’ll compensate you monetarily”
The biggest area where I see that this fails is not in the actual sale in exchange of products and services for money, but in the PROCESS before, during and after the actual sales.
If you break down the actual sale, which is only the transactional step in the process, you’re missing the vast majority of the preemptive steps that lead to actual sale.
You’re also missing the post-sales activities that will turn your one-time sales, into multiple sales and future referrals.
Let me illustrate this so it makes better sense.
This is a diagram of a Continuous Improvement Cycle (more on this in a future post) of the typical steps that need to happen before a sale and what happens after a sale to prime your profit pump for future sales.
As you can see a typical sales process can have 5+ steps in the acquisition and monetization phase prior to an actual sale and another 5 to 10 steps after the initial sale to setup your retention phase.
Once you visually see the steps, things make much sense. They also cause a bit more confusion since each step within the process comes with several of its own questions.
The point of this illustration is to show you that a single sentence, like “I need more sales” really is an entire process, each with it’s own starting and ending points that need to follow a seamless flow in order to make a new sale.
Kinda scary. I know.
Don’t fear, there’s a straight forward approach to understanding each step of the sales cycle to break each area down to see where your bottlenecks are.
For many of you, this may be the first time that you’re thinking about new sales in this process based approach.
When you visually break each step down based on what’s working for you now as a start, you can better understand what areas you need to focus on to turn what’s working now into a repeatable process.
If you really don’t know what’s working now and you’ve gotten sales in a reactive manner, this sales process initiative is imperative to starting to understand what’s working in your business and how to systematize each step to start getting.
What’s next?
Don’t let this process based approach to more sales intimidate you. Once you grasp this concept of sales process mapping, vast, new ideas and possibilities will start to unfold for you and your business.
If you’d like help creating a sales process map to break out what you’re doing now, refine it, optimize it and systematize it, please schedule a free consultation with me and I’d be happy to break this whole process down for you to help you get “more sales”.