Growing Your Business in Difficult Times - Sales and Marketing

The two most effective growth strategies we are seeing at this time are increasing sales and marketing budgets and acquiring weaker competitors. Often the two go hand-in-hand since the owner of the smaller company often becomes a salesperson for the acquirer. This month I will touch on sales and marketing. Next month, acquisitions.

Increasing Sales and Marketing - getting an early jump on sales and marketing in order to gain market share is a proven way to grow your business as the economy restarts. At the bottom of a recession businesses and consumers stop buying anything except essentials. Even essentials are often cut back.

For instance an industrial equipment servicing firm we work with has seen repair orders slow down. They are finding that often the client will have two or three machines that need repairs in addition to the one they have been called to fix. As demand picks up all of these machines will have to be serviced and then eventually replaced.

Getting in front of these prospects early (but not too early) will lead to more sales and sales growth. Remember in all your sales efforts that the initial need is usually created because of pain. Without pain your biggest competitor, “doing nothing” is hard to overcome. Once there is pain you must focus on how your product or service provides the most value to overcome the pain and then contribute to the future of the organization. That is not the same as lowest price. If it was lowest price everyone would have Walmart watches on their wrists for $4.99 or less.

If you are in sales (or are an owner doing sales) and have never taken a sales course, do so quickly. There is a defined process to find pain, qualify, create value, and generate profitable sales.

One other thought. Recently I attended a seminar on fast growing consulting firms. The data all supported that narrow / deep niche players expanded quicker and had higher profits than generalists. While it is logical that being a generalist and not letting anything out of the net seems like the fastest way to grow data does not support that.

As an owner/manager the most important thing you can do in the sales arena is provide training and manage the process. Managing the process means understanding and tracking your pipeline. For instance if you sell consulting and a typical sales cycle is 3 months, what activities should be happening at 1 month and 2 months to indicate that a pipeline is being built.

How can you apply statistics to track your salespeople’s progress? Perhaps you generally have a meeting to perform a needs analysis a week after the introductory phone call. How many of those meetings occurred last week? By tracking statistics and then managing your marketing and sales staff you can manage your sales progress and know what to expect. More importantly you can reduce spending or change course if the current programs are not producing.

Increasing your sales and marketing efforts is a very important way to grow.