Whether you are an entrepreneur who has recently launched a startup or you have spent quite some time building up a small business with average sales; you must know the sales process well. Without knowing the basic process, you won’t boost your sales and revenue as effectively as possible!
An entrepreneur cannot be successful if they are not a good salesperson!
Well, it doesn’t mean to take over the sales team and do everything yourself, rather, knowing the effective sales techniques will help you better collaborate with the team and so everyone is working in the same direction to boost sales and revenue.
Remember, it’s your very own business and only you can make the best decision for it. If a sales team is falling behind in achieving targets, don’t just fire them. Rather than spending time and money to hire a new team, guiding the existing one can produce better results.
Well, that can happen only when you know how Sales work.
29 Essential Small Business Steps to Boost Sales & Revenue
In this article, we will discuss the essential factors that help in boosting sales and how to increase revenue. Here it goes:
Planning:
The most important part of doing anything is its plan. So, when it comes to boosting your sales, the first and foremost part is planning whereby the following items should be given weightage.
1- Create an annual sales plan.
2- Divide the annual plan into quarters.
3- To be more specific, drill it down to a monthly plan.
An effective sales plan is one with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) goals. To do so, you must have:
4- Updated data about all the existing customers.
5- Complete specifications for potential customers.
6- Time and funds allocated for ongoing market research.
7- Time allocated for meetings (Client & in-house meetings both are crucial and need parallel time for the effectiveness of the plan).
8- Time allocated for reporting; without reports, you can’t just measure anything.
Strategizing the Plan:
Having a sales plan with set targets within a specific time frame is the basic requirement to bring your sales department on track. To actually, make them work effectively, you need to strategize the sales plan.
Here is how to do it.
9- Have an action plan; a simple excel file with “task detail”, “assigned to”, “due date” and “status” columns. Depending upon the depth of reporting, you can add desired columns, but these four are the crucial ones.
10- Must have a referral reward for the existing customers.
11- Do include social media along with the traditional media to find prospects.
12- Get various presentations ready to be presented to a group of potential customers in events.
13- Do keep a track of all the relevant exhibitions during the year and pre-book.
14- Have all other networking events in the list where you can spread the word.
15- Work closely with customer service and the marketing people to get the benefit of word of mouth.
Executing the plan:
A sales plan will be successful only if it is executed well and execution is the toughest part of all. Here we will discuss the points that make execution simple yet effective.
16- Maintain a weekly diary.
17- Plan daily calls.
18- Be clear prior to making a call with quick pre-call planning.
19- The sales team should meet at least twice a week to discuss targets and results.
20- Keep everything on record, i.e. make an action plan in excel with a “status” column which should be updated accordingly.
Staying Updated:
With everyday sales, your database keeps on growing, however, it is important to keep it clean and optimized, so any record should be readily available as needed. To keep it up to date, follow the points below:
21- Keep the first call as a fact-finding initiative and do follow up on it.
22- A follow-up must be done within the next two days, whereby you present the proposal (or using the tracking features of proposal tools like these can allow you to time your follow-up perfectly).
23- Move with second follow up for decision.
24- Do a follow-up visit if needed for the decision.
25- Make a post-visit call for the decision.
26- Analyze the leads on a weekly or bi-monthly basis and keep them in the relevant filtered lists.
You are at a 90% success rate by following the above points, however, to maximize the success factor, you must do a little more.
27- Figure out the medium that generates most of the sales, and double your efforts in that particular direction.
28- Filter the mediums that have not been successful so far and analyze. If you cannot find any point of improvement there, abandon those and put your efforts in the medium where 20% of the effort can produce 80% of the results.
29- Keep on doing analysis in multiple dimensions and tweak your plans accordingly.
Extras: The Intangibles
Often times, many of the resources and steps you need to utilize and follow don’t include concrete stats, facts, or outcomes. In this section, we’re going to describe a couple things to keep in mind that should ensure that you hit your potential.
- Stay humble. If your business start to take off, it’s easy to lose sight of the many affordances and advantages you may have had along the way. Recognizing that you couldn’t be where you are today without certain people or bouts of luck is essential to further personal growth. With this personal growth, you’ll see it translate into your company.
- Treat your employees well. Make sure the people contributing to your business are doing it because they are invested. The best way to keep your employees motivated and dedicated is to simply treat them well and make sure you recognize them regularly for their efforts.
- Learn from mistakes. As we mentioned before, part of the process is analyzing what worked and what didn’t work. Whether you are able to learn what you need to learn from those mistakes is up to you. Humility helps here as well, as you sometimes need to accept the fact that you need to do something differently.
- Never stop learning. Constantly be seeking more knowledge and apply it in all the ways you can. This is the formula for continued success.
Conclusion
Depending upon business-specific goals, a lot more can be done but put all that on your sales team’s plate. Being a business owner, knowing the above points will do most of the work for you. And sure, if you are a business owner who is more into sales, you can enhance your skills and knowledge further.
Overall, with the previously mentioned points, you’ll be on the fast track to success (as fast as that could realistically be) and boost sales and revenue. Keep following a productive, humble philosophy and there won’t be limits to what you and your company can do. Best of luck, thanks for reading, and we will see you next week!
