Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) face many challenges in the sales arena. The two most significant of these are invariably;  

• Challenge One - Find, recruit & retain high quality sales people
• Challenge Two - Develop high quality, profitable, long-term customers

Challenge One - Find, recruit & retain high quality sales people 

Challenge Two - Develop high quality, profitable, long-term customers

The issue of quality sales people is the main cause of challenge two - Developing high quality, profitable, long-term customers. The definition of a high quality customer is one where:

• You have a win-win, mutually beneficial relationship
• You relationship exists at the highest possible level with the key stakeholders
• They take a number of products or services from you
• They see you as a key supplier or integral to their success
• They believe in your people, brand and product, they will not use a competitor
• They will actively promote your people, brand and product (word of mouth advertising & referrals)

Gaining high quality customers is the focus of any successful business over the longer term. Look at any industry or sector where individual key players have shown steady, sustainable, controlled growth and where they have outperformed their competitors. You will notice a number of similarities around the quality of the sales people, perception of the brand, and standard of the product or service. You will also note that in the majority of these organisations, a number of reports and statements focus on 'The Customer'.

What makes these organisations so special is that they have simply developed an effective sales, supply, customer management and retention system. This system runs like a well-oiled, high-performance engine, where all the cogs turn and interlink in a highly engineered way. In business, this is like having a successful, proven 'How to' users-guide for all the key aspects of sales and client fulfilment.

Whether we like it or not, every business has a system that covers all of these critical sales and client management areas. What is evident is that these systems don't necessarily interlink effectively. In fact, some of these systems seem to work against each other and slow down progress, creating roadblocks for sales and client management to cross.

Interestingly enough, high quality sales people also have a system they use at an individual level to sell effectively. This system guides them like a missile to the target and covers all areas of attitude, skill and execution of their tasks.

If an organisation wishes to overcome the two key challenges of high quality sales people and high quality customers, they need to develop an effective system that covers sales and client management. An effective selling system has a huge number of benefits to any business - too many to list, however they can be summarised into the following:

• Increase profitability per customer and per sales person
• Reduce cost of sale
• Reduce lead times
• Increase win ratio
• Improve internal communication and access to information
• Increase control and focus
• Improve forecasting and business planning
• Improve customer relationships and retention
• Reduce churn of quality people

You do not need to find, recruit and retain high quality sales people, especially as they are expensive. Even small organisations can develop quality sales people themselves and realise the key benefits this brings by simply introducing a successful selling system. This means that the organisation is reliant on an effective, proven and sustainable system and not on individual sales people to perform. If the system works, then the sales people can use the system to work for them. The system will show the organisation very clearly who is performing well and who needs to be developed, and it can even show exactly where and how.

To clarify the key point, however, we are not saying that you can or should employ low quality sales people and tell them what to do, and how to do it. What we are saying is that the quality of focus has changed, from finding high quality sales people who can work individually and do the numbers for you, to developing a high quality, repeatable sales system.

This is not a new concept; every successful franchise is built on this very principle.

If a business wants to realise these benefits, then it is undeniable that they need to have an effective sales team. It is also undeniable that they need to develop high quality customers. If your organisation needs to realise these benefits and you would like the opportunity to work with a specialist, then contact Enact Services. They have developed the 'Complete Selling System'. This has been designed specifically to address the challenges faced by your sales team(s). This system has been proven to positively impact on the sales results of SME and corporate organisations. It will do the same for you.

The Complete Selling System comprises a number of services such as:

• Sales function Health Check - review of people, processes, proposition, customer needs and go to market strategy;
• Find, recruit, place sales people, for a fixed fee and with no on-going recurring recruitment costs;
• Ongoing management of performance reviews;
• Sales training and development services;
• Sales consultancy on best practise;
• Interim Sales Management
• Coaching Sales People, Sales Managers and Sales Directors

Share this: digg   del.ico.us   Newsvine   Reddit   Furl   technorati   Facebook

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name (required)

Email (required) (not published)

Website

Title

POST

By posting on this website you are agreeing to abide by our website comment policy and all posts are subject to the approval of the website editor. We will remove posts that contain offensive or threatening language, personal attacks on the writer or other posters, posts that are off topic and posts that are considered spam or specifically used to promote any commercial products or services. Any poster who repeatedly contravenes the policy will be banned from posting on the website.