How do you Deal with Growing Pains?

How often as a manager do you find that you can’t spare the time from your busy day to take a fresh, objective look at how you can improve your business? How many times do you think to yourself, or even say, “I’m too busy running the business today to think about areas we can improve tomorrow”? You’re not alone.

How many Sales Directors do you know who are already busy running the field sales team, which they know how to do and are comfortable doing, only to be given the responsibility of running a telesales team as well? Are you one of them?

If you work for a smaller company that doesn’t have its own Sales Director or Manager, how do you work out the best way to achieve the increased sales you need, to help your business grow and thrive? What’s the best way forward?

Don’t struggle on regardless. Find someone who can look at your business from the outside, to see what improvements can be made. Take on a virtual telesales manager who can give you back the time you need, or find a mentor for you and your team to talk to about any difficulties you face.

When you can focus on doing what you’re really good at and let someone else handle the other issues, you can help your business to thrive.

Selling in Stages

Stage 1 – Planning & Preparation

Over the next few months, we’ll take you through a simple sales process that you can use to help your business to grow. To get started, you need to think about the planning and preparation you need to do, before making sales calls.

• Make sure you set personal and business goals – short, medium and long-term
• Establish your sales targets – daily, weekly, monthly and annually – and plot them on a chart, to provide motivation to exceed your targets
• Begin each day with 10 minutes planning to help you maximise your time
• Maintain an organised customer database, or your productivity will suffer. Try to find an appropriate CRM package
• Record your calls when you can and listen to them, as this will help improve your sales skills
• Set yourself a goal before you make each call, even when calling existing customers
• Identify the decision maker before making a call. Trying to sell to a person who has little or no buying power is a waste of time
• Find out what your prospects need as much as possible before talking to them
• Always focus on the benefits you can offer your customer, to be sure you have something to offer that will be of interest
• Know your customers. Research them by checking out their websites or existing company records. Get to know any relevant history before each conversation.

Following some of all of these simple steps will help you make much more effective sales calls.

Growing in the Right Direction

Sales for a small Oxfordshire business to business ISP were growing. However, the profit margin was getting lower, mainly due to increased competition in the marketplace. Keeping two salespeople on the road was expensive, especially when much of their time was taken up with securing orders for low value products. An alternative approach was decided on, which involved setting up a telesales team to tackle the smaller orders. This would give the field salespeople more time to concentrate on growing the accounts with larger potential.

Communiqué drew up a business plan for this new approach, working out the associated costs and coming up with a strategy that would allow the new telesales team to pay for itself within just seven months.

We then recruited and trained the new team, managing them for the first two weeks of operation. After this we provided support in the form of mentoring for the first twelve months, which included telephone support and continued coaching, meeting with the team for two days each month. We gave the Sales Manager advice on 'teething problems' during the initial period. We also provided support and advice on how to keep up the initial levels of motivation and how to provide the team with the right sort of incentives without blowing the budget.

The result is a fully functioning telesales team that efficiently handles the smaller orders and happy, more driven field salespeople who can spend the time they need looking after their larger customers.

The bottom line is a growing business with a healthy profit margin.