In yesterday’s Meeting of the Titans, we covered a lot of ground with the Member in focus, relating to his national expansion plans. This included exploring the best options for structure, freight and logistics, manufacturing (onshore vs offshore), sales and working with distributors.
The Brains Trust asked pertinent questions and shared their experience, connections, resources and wisdom in spades, providing many solutions and perspectives supporting the Member with his path forward.
One point that we spent some time on was the optimisation of lead generation through tighter processes and a quality CRM, to provide a consistent flow of quality leads in the appropriate quantity to keep a driven sales person/team happy and busy.
It’s an interesting point that many businesses struggle to achieve. In fact, in recent conversations with arguably one of the best sales and marketing companies in the World, they shared that originally their intention was to supply high quality sales people and appointment setters to businesses. But they found that most of the businesses didn’t have a sustainable and consistent lead or marketing system, so they now deliver both marketing and sales together in order to ensure the sales people they train and then hand over, have an appropriate quantity of high quality leads to work with.
We drilled down into the sales processes that this Member currently has in place and after some discussion, he identified this was something that he wanted to attend to and improve, to take his business to the next level.
It’s an interesting thing with sales processes, as in many cases as business leaders, we understand the benefits and importance of processes, but it is perhaps not our area of passion or genius. The same can be said for sales people, who are generally much happier speaking to and interacting with clients, working in the present moment and being creative with each situation, than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, filling out required key performance indicators. For this reason, it can be an area that can easily lack attention or deemed less important.
Although sales people generally don’t like completing or entering data for kpi systems, they perform higher with them. It’s the combination of the structure provided by the process, and the dynamic skills of the sales team, which create the ultimate results.
Consistent leads and use of systems to convert prospects to clients equals consistent and sustainable business income and growth.
One of the Members contributed this gem yesterday which sums it up perfectly:
Selling is an art, but sales is a process.
