Stop Listening to the News. Double Your Sales Now!

Written by Craig Klein

Have you seen the news lately? Yeah. Tough stuff.

If you run a business, this is a very scary time. 6 months ago you probably had plans to grow. Maybe you were going to hire new sales people. Maybe you were going to increase your marketing budget. Well those plans may be on hold right now.

Throughout 2007 and 2008, I’ve been working with small and medium sized companies to reorganize sales processes and realizing tremendous improvements. Without hiring another sales person, without firing anyone, without increasing advertising spending our customers have been realizing tremendous increases in sales. In fact, frequently these companies have been able to more than double their sales within months when they follow through on the entire process.

One customer with 10 sales people saw monthly sales go from $1m to $1.5m within 4 months.

So as the financial world began to crumble and the news just kept getting worse, we decided it was time to share this process with all the small business owners out there who might be having to reevaluate their plans for the coming months.

So early this year we began releasing a series of articles entitled “Double Your Sales in 2009”. Now that all five chapters have been released, the entire series is available as a free eBook.

It’s been the most popular article, whitepaper or eBook we’ve ever released. Clearly the title’s getting people’s attention. The good news is that the process is easy for any business to follow without spending much money at all and the results are often tremendous.

Here’s a summary of the process:

Qualify Early and Often - define questions that indicate the "qualification" of any lead and ask every lead right up front before you invest lots of time and money in them.
Timing is Everything - create guidelines for what makes it worthwhile to take each step in the sales dance with each prospect.

The Law of Attraction - teach everyone on your team to say no to prospects unless they are sure that the investment of their time and your money will yield the desired result.

Set the Mustangs Free - make it easy for sales reps to track what happens with each lead, the answers to your qualification questions and the sales activities invested in. Hold them accountable for following the process by sharing the results of this tracking with the team.

Pour in the Jet Fuel - track the source of each lead and redirect marketing efforts and investments toward the lead sources that generating the most frequently qualified and close-able leads.

The idea is that if you “disqualify” prospects up front, you free up tremendous time for your sales team to nurture relationships with highly qualified prospects. Then you determine how to reserve costly sales activities like presentations, proposals, demos, etc. for the right prospects at the right time. Again, we’re freeing up time and money to focus on the best prospects. In order to do this, your sales team has to learn to say NO to prospects. That’s not easy for most sales people. The good news its very powerful. Saying no is something most sales people don’t do very often and it has the effect of establishing respect and rapport instantly. Then the real magic is in giving your sales team an easy way to track the level of qualification of each prospect and what sales activities are appropriate. Then add to that tracking where the lead came from and the results are almost always amazing.

Most often we find that businesses are focusing on the marketing or advertising that produces the greatest quantity of leads but, those leads tend to consume the greatest amount of resources and produce the least amount of sales. The problem is you can’t tell that if you’re not tracking the source, qualification and delivery of sales actions to each prospect.

Armed with this data, you can redirect existing marketing spending and sales effort to more productive areas and produce more sales with the same marketing budget and sales staff. More often than not, it’s 2x, 3x or more than what you’re seeing today.

To reiterate, this should not require that you turn over the apple cart so to speak. If you’ve got a good manageable sales process in place today, all you have to do is make some adjustments to the sequence of things and start keeping track of the results.

Getting buy-in from the sales team, training them how to qualify properly and when to deliver sales activities to which customers will take a few meetings and discussions but, that’s it.

Tracking where leads come from and what happens with them can literally be done on a spreadsheet or printed “lead sheets” that the sales person fills out as things develop. In fact, starting with a paper tracking system is a great way to be sure you know what you’re doing before you go out and spend money on a CRM or Contact Management System.

There really is no excuse. Anyone can do this without dropping everything else, without laying people off and without spending much if any money. And the pay off is tremendous!

Think about it like this… Your competition is probably reacting to the current economic climate by running around offering all sorts of discounts and “deals”. That only cheapens the perception of the company and its products in the eyes of the customer. If you follow through on reordering your sales process, saying no the unqualified prospects and tracking the results so that you can optimize the leads your sales team is working with, your customers will see your company as successful and strong in tough times.

Remember – people buy from people they respect and admire.

Craig Klein -
	Craig Klein is CEO and Founder of SalesNexus.com , a leading online contact management system for small business sales teams. Craig’s a sales process guy. His passion is helping small businesses hire, train, measure and manage sales people through their sales process. Craig’s blog, Sell, Sell, Sell! has become a valued resource for business owners and sales executives. Read More >>
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