How to Increase Sales by 20% Without Spending More for Advertising By Mark Tewart
The managers in your business must have a written job description for their team with clearly defined responsibilities and expectations. Having specific goals for the department is required. Daily action plans for selling, training, appointments, one-on-one coaching, save-a deal meetings, deal structuring, follow-up, etc will increase sales by 20% without spending more for advertising.
The problem is that few managers ever do these things consistently. Most managers spend more time managing things than leading people. If you read biographies of successful people or businesses, one common thread always seems to be a strong sense of passion fueled by big goals. When you write specific goals down on paper, you are committing yourself mentally, emotionally and physically to the attainment of those goals. Does your business and your employees set the long and short-term goals? As a manager, have you committed your dreams to paper for the month, six months, a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years? Speed of the boss, speed of the crew, if you make the commitment, your employees will, too.
Once you have set your goals, plan your specific actions to reach them. Write a specific action plan for when to train, what to train on, who will conduct the training, how long the training will last and your expected goal of improvement for that area. Post a training schedule for the month and make it a monthly priority. Training is not a sometimes activity. It’s an everyday requirement.
Set goals for appointments and make action plans to reach those goals as a business. This requires goals and action plans for each sales person as to their activities to set daily appointments. You can set business goals but each person must have their own goals to take ownership of. Strive for and monitor appointments and watch your sales increase. Every sales person should be coached daily in a one-on-one session. Set a game plan for who does this, when they do it and the expected results. Items covered in those sessions should be their sales pace in relation to their goals and their percentage of success for total seen contacts, product or service presentations, proposals, closed deals and completed deals. Those items should be monitored for both yesterday’s business and month-to-date totals.
Each sales person should have a day planner that is connected to the managers. The sales people should be required to have a plan for their day that is broken down into an hourly focus. To-do lists, appointments lists, goals lists and follow-up systems should be reviewed. Follow up should be broken down for both sold and unsold customers. Review yesterday’s appointments for each sales person, walk back through what happened and listen for clues that would show breakdowns in their sale process. These activities alone can increase your businesses sales by 20%.
To make more money, each morning the managers hold a save-a-deal meeting to review yesterday’s sold and unsold business. Both made and not made deals should be reviewed. Review approvals to see if they have been completed. And if not, why? If completed, have they been booked out and turned to the office or administration? If third party financing is an issue, review finance turn downs for reasons why and any possibilities to approve those deals. Create heat sheets which detail any issues that are keeping made deals from completion. If contracts for funding are used, review in transit for deals not funded.
If you have a strong producing salesperson your focus can be more on how you can assist him rather than checking his actions and results. Your top 5% are self-motivated and don’t need the baby sitting or the inspection. The rest of your salespeople do need inspection. When did it become the norm that salespeople are treated as free agents? Everyone needs coaching. Blaming salespeople for bad production without trying to coach them is wrong.
As a manager you have to look in the mirror and take responsibility for all things. It takes increased effort and focus to improve your sales 20 percent. Many businesses just increase their advertising in hopes of increasing sales, and in turn, make their sales people lead junkies. The percentage of gain in bottom line and long-term benefits is what you are seeking, not short-term fixes.
The first step is to get rid of the notion, that there are good and bad months. You either have good or bad goals, game plans, actions and reviews of actions. Good or bad months are directly attributed to those items and are not luck.
Mark Tewart Author of “How To Be a Sales Superstar – Break All the Rules and Succeed Doing It” (John Wiley & Sons 2008) ***In book stores and Amazon October 17, 2008***
http://www.marktewart.com
http://www.howtobeasalessuperstar.info
http://www.tewart.com
Join my blogs at: http://www.marktewartsblog.com
www.myspace.com/marktewart and
http://marktewart.wordpress.com
Tewart Enterprises Inc. and Tewart Management Group Inc
307 East Silver St Lebanon, Ohio 45036
888 2Tewart (888 283-9278) or (513) 932-9526
Tags: Contrarian Sales, How to Become a Sales Superstar, Mark Tewart, Marketing, Professional Speaking, Sales, Sales Management, Sales Training
