Three steps to winning new business
One challenge we regularly come across when we work with businesses is a trepidation to sell their products and services. Non-salespeople often find the prospective daunting or just a bit uncomfortable. But if you want to grow your business, you need to be clear on what you are selling, who is going to buy from you, and how your products or services can solve their problems.
Geoff Gwynn, one of our business growth advisors, has extensive sales experience. He has tips and insights for businesses looking to win new business.
What’s the problem?
Very few people get up in the morning thinking they need to buy something, especially business services. But people do wake up in the morning, or in the middle of the night, worrying about business problems and how they are going to solve them.
Equally, very few people buy things on a whim – except chocolate! Therefore, you need to take your time to work out what will motivate people to buy what you are selling.
There are three key steps to successful sales: clarity, focus, and discipline.
- Clarity – Who are you trying to sell to? What are you trying to sell? What has the best margins? We recently worked with a company who had two main products, one of which was three times as expensive as the other. Following our work with them they have doubled their revenues. They did this by focusing on the cheaper of the two products, partly because they could sell more, and partly because they could install more in the same amount of time, improving their margins.
- Focus – Now you know what you are selling and who to, it’s time to target sectors and get your messaging straight. Once you are clear why people might buy from you, you can really focus on what’s going to be the most effective way to achieve that.
- Discipline – Sales isn’t a one-off activity and the timescale for purchases depends on the size of the problem. You need to keep to a regular routine of making calls, booking in meetings, and keeping in touch with potential buyers or clients so you are in their mind when the urgent need or compelling event arises.
If you are attending a wedding on Saturday and you don’t have any shoes to wear, that’s an urgent need and you are going to need to solve it quickly. Here at elephants child, we work with business owners who might have been building up their company for years, and plan to sell it in a few years’ time. We know our potential clients aren’t going to make a snap decision to sign up with us, and our sales process is tailored to that.
Sadly, we sometimes have people get in touch with us because they have suffered a serious issue in their business. Geoff uses an analogy of a dirty, oily rope. This isn’t something of value if you offer it to someone going about their normal day. But to someone five stories up in a building that’s on fire, the rope has huge value.
Where can you find the people who NEED your product or service? That said, we do like to work with people before they are in desperate need of the dirty, oily rope too. We aim to capture the attention of business owners and senior leaders who are keen to grow their company, especially to grow with purpose, who are thinking about how to plan for their retirement, or want support so that shareholders can take different exit routes.
Essentially it all comes down to timing and demonstrating problem solving abilities.
The problem elephants child can solve is to support your business to get clarity, decide where to focus, and create a plan to you keep you and your team disciplined. If the time is now for you to win new business by improving your sales process, please get in touch. We can do this as a stand-alone service, or as part of our overall Business Growth Planning sessions.