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May 25, 2010
 By Mark Faust Echelon Management
 Our sales improvement business has always thrived during recessions, and one reason is what a recent Harvard Business Journal report showed in how the faster growing companies with aggressive management have been shown to invest in growth strategies during down times and reduce costs during the up times contrary to the typical approach of business. Thus it is easier for us to sell the better companies on growth strategies during a downturn.
We’ve noticed these companies tend to gain market share during down times. If they can do it, why can’t you? Isn’t your competition facing the same pressures as you? Aren’t the sales reps of competitors as likely to use the recession as an excuse as anyone? Much of what it takes to beat a recession is the concerted effort and decision to not let it happen to you, but to take it head on and innovate your way out of being a victim of lower sales.
Here are just three of the many strategies a company can take during the midst or beginnings of a recession to actually increase sales.
1. Talk about it, decide as a team to no let it be an excuse
2. Begin building a list of innovations in the marketing and selling of your business then prioritize and act on them
3. Create a list of reasons as to why you are the best company to do business with during a recession
Some examples of selling and marketing innovations are:
- Create a marketing campaign that can be as simple as 3 inexpensive mailings followed up by strategically timed sales calls with your top 20% customers and highest growth potentials.
- Create incentives for tying up business with you, or buying more from you. Focus on creating incentives that don’t cost you much or anything at all, but actually should be lowering your total COS/Cost of Sales. Your customers benefit because they are securing a better than average cost during the recession.
- Survey your customers for what they most fear during these times and what problems most impede their performance during a recession, and then find unique solutions your team can deliver to those needs. The survey in and of itself, if done over the phone or face to face will act as a selling accelerator. Never conduct surveys through email or in the mail.
- At the same time while conducting depth interviews with your customers in a way that is an open ended qualitative face to face or phone approach; ask about what makes you different, and why they prefer you or the competition. This helps to further clarify your positioning in the marketplace. This analysis helps to prioritize your competitive advantages and weaknesses. The process also helps you to better target your idea customers, demographics etc. Improving the focus your sales and marketing efforts have on the right prospects will improve sales results as well.
- Hire more sales people, put a company-wide focus on new sales and marketing strategies and create new incentive packages or sales rewards for securing new customers.
- Getting the team to set a mission critical company growth goal and have every one identify ways that they individually can help reach that central sales growth objective brings the entire team’s focus onto the most important focus during a challenging economy.
- Only focusing on cost savings gives a company a fraction of the potential in the profit improvement process as costs can only go so low. Sales and production are the open ended and often unlimited potential areas of focus for health sales and profit improvement.
Bring the team together immediately and start on the three steps toward growth in these challenging economic times.
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May 6, 2010
“Define Your Difference or Die”
By Mark Faust@EchelonManagement.com
Is the economy affecting your business negatively? If so, what percent of the affect is from the economy versus the negative attitude of you or any of your team? Yet why are many businesses thriving in this time? Indeed, many of our clients are having banner years and the highest ever growth rates despite increased competition and the bad economy.
We’ve seen firsthand sales productivity plummet in some groups based on the false perception that they won’t be able to sell much, yet when challenged to get productivity up to or beyond normal levels, some have found that their sales closing ratios are actually higher! The beauty of selling in a down economy is that most of your competition is dejected, demoralized and spiraling downward.
While it’s a bit flippant to quip, “We choose not to participate in this recession” there are many strategies you can execute to benefit from this unique time.
While improving productivity, innovating marketing and sales approaches and selling on value are more important than ever, another area we are finding crucial to our client’s success in these times is their decision on strategic differentiation. One of the first steps of strategy is deciding where you will compete; defining your defensible competitive advantage and going out and leveraging on that strength.
The CPA of an ag client jumped up and told them “look guys you either define your difference or die!” because if they didn’t carve out a niche and compete on a defensible competitive strength that the large multi nationals couldn’t copy, they could be obliterated by price warfare. They chose to compete on a few unique points while maintaining very high price margins. When competitors resorted to the largest percentage price drops in history, our client retained the vast majority of customers, despite those customers being tempted by the sharpest price drops they had ever seen.
Defining your strategic difference protects you from competition and pays financially. One example is of a friend in the financial industry. While most have lost an average 40% in their portfolios this last year, he was able to close his fund up almost 10% in 2008. Why? Because unlike 99% of the orthodox financial managers who have a “buy and hold” strategy, he operates his hedge fund more like a day trader and installs a sell order on investments so that they sell on drops sometimes of just 1%.
Traditionalists mock his methodology because it isn’t what is taught or accepted, but his clients laugh all the way to the bank with previous years averaging around 30%. This is a great example of how pride and the lack of innovation, trap competition into stagnated strategies.
Whatever happened to “buy low, sell high” I ask, “The majority of the market does the exact opposite of what is logical, especially in a bad economy” he replies. This makes the point as to what can be the root of your coming advantage, how can you differentiate from the masses, in a way that will gain market share during this economy?
Three Steps
- You can only choose to compete on two of these three areas; quality, service and price. Ask your customers what they see as your defining difference, and decide on your positioning. Make specific lists of your largest growth customers and prospects who most fit your ideal profile. Focus!
- As leader of your company, set an objective with your team that despite the challenging economy, you plan on accelerating growth and continuously putting in place strategies to facilitate growth.
- Stamp out the fear! Build and review your plan for gaining share frequently.
For a free copy of our Strategy Handbook detailing more about positioning your company toward a defensible competitive advantage in the tough economy, drop me a comment.
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April 26, 2010
 By Brad Ristas bristas@rayandbarney.com
How do you keep your top reps from jumping ship?
This is a very important question in this challenging economy.
The first thing you need to consider is whether you are aligned with the reps own goals. Get to know your sales force better by asking questions and spending some time with them. This investment in your time upfront and early on will pay back in so many ways over time (and it’s never too late to begin).
These meetings could include collaborating on their career roadmaps or just giving them a place to ask questions and make comments about anything that concerns them. You can become their “go-to” person when they have questions about next steps. Remember, often times these sales reps are out there by themselves for long stretches of times trying to find new ways to penetrate accounts. Their entire workday is not always so clearly scripted. They want to hear from you if they feel that the information you are funneling to them can assist in building their business. You can gain a better understanding of what motivates your Sales Force to do a particular job if you build this initial relationship on Team Building and Trust.
Some top Sales Reps are truly representative of the organization from day one. They demonstrate their loyalty by their abilities to get out there and get done whatever is necessary to promote the well being, growth, and profitability of the organization. These key Sales Reps understand being of service to the customer first, and then of service to the organization. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the Sales Rep who is strictly “coin operated,” as there is room in the organization for them also. You just need to know that you should handle their needs differently from how you handle the true team player who has bought into a program of internal ownership for your sales process. Just because the latter Rep is motivated more by money, and that may not be aligned with your own strategic long term goals, it doesn’t mean that they cannot be a Team player. Appeal to them at a different level. There are still a lot of good Sales Reps in this category as well.
So the answer is quite simple if the communications is simple also. Both are retained by always improving these communications processes, coaching them equally through good and bad times, and enforcing the ideals that it is a Team approach and that you as a manager share in both the successes and failures he/she enjoys. Put yourself on the same page by sharing their route with them, giving them the feeling and understanding that they aren’t out there alone. It isn’t them against the world, but rather, they are looking to build a successful business practice, and you are their partner and advocate in getting them to where they want to be.
You do this successfully, and you’ve likely given them every reason to stay with you.
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March 9, 2010
What is the Goal of Your Business?
By Mark Faust@EchelonManagement.com
“The goal of this business is to make money, of course!” responded the owner.
Then we asked a few more questions.
How do you involve your team in efforts to improve profitability or has this mostly been the job of management?
- Besides yourself, who else is given incentives to improve profitability?
- How aware are your people as to what areas most affect profitability, such as pricing concessions, controllable expenses etc.? Are you able to prioritize, quantify and communicate to the team to what extent the top areas of profit drain are within your business?
- What types of business, customers, products, services etc. yield you the greatest profitability? Is your sales team aware of these and are there incentives for them to sell profitably? Are you coaching them to effectively – helping to move more business toward the more profitable areas?
- What we find with our clients is that tremendous increases in profit can occur by implementing a process around improving profits. Here are a few strategies that can help to create results around increasing profits.
  It helps if you can determine incremental awards or incentives around ideas that improve profits. We’ve seen rewards given as a percentage of money saved and thus tens of thousands of dollars with a potential cap as well as simple small cash or gift card awards for any and every idea that has an impact on profitability. Determine an incentive program that you can live with and deliver upon regardless of how voluminous the profit improving ideas may become. Back up monetary rewards with genuine praise and gratitude; this can be in written or formal spoken expression.
Not that selling your most profitable products and services is always the highest priority, but it helps to show your team the rankings of how your products and services stack up in regards to profits. It also helps to show as many areas of costs that may have any potential for improvement. Don’t limit these areas to just the immediate areas of responsibility of the employee, but rather allow their creativity and awareness of what is happening on the front lines of your business help to innovate completely new solutions or incremental savings no matter how small.
Encourage even the smallest of savings. Even if just 15 employees came up with 15 ideas that each increased profitability by an average of just .05%, that could in some cases work to double the profitability of a company.
Often the greatest drains in profitability occur in the selling process. Sales people often are unaware that even just a one percent price concession is frequently well over a 10% reduction in profitability. Training your team to sell on value and to negotiate options and the estimates of what your solutions stand to deliver are just a couple of ways of inoculating your team from profit draining price concessions.
 There are the Eight Essential Areas of Objectives in the strategic planning process (for a free Strategy Handbook email us) and while Profitability Objectives are of the lowest priority according to Peter Drucker it is still always essential to have specific profitability objectives. Like all objectives they must be measurable on a regular basis, preferably at least monthly. There needs to be clear accountabilities and at least quarterly points at which progress will be measured and discussed.
Involve your whole team in setting and executing upon the objective of improving profitability and you will get far more accomplished than doing it alone.
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October 9, 2009
 Who has more money than they know what to do with? Who was told not to worry about sales performance since we do not have the budget to develop and train the sales team? Sales Performance is more on the radar now than ever before with the tightening of budgets and a tough economy. Many of us have decreased budgets for developing and training our sales teams and are looking for practical ways to get it done!
If you find that you’re one of the many Sales Professionals looking to do more with less, take heart! There are ways you can develop and train your sales team with a quality program, maximizing your sales dollars!
Do you know what your sales team needs are, we sure didn’t until we were intentional about it and assessed, reviewed and uncovered the needs with documented items for all of us to see.
First, look to assess and determine precisely what your team’s development and training needs are. Keep track of all information related to your Sales Process; look to see where it might be breaking down. Could your team use some guidance about prospecting? Or is the process going well and hitting a snag at Closure? Use this information to outline a customized sales development and training plan that fits your goals & challenges. Document & schedule these topics for your weekly or monthly Sales Meetings. Sessions can be done in a group and with personal assignments.
Look at how you can leverage excellent resources such as SellingPower.com. Their DVDs cover many selling tips from industry experts, they are brief and to the point. They provide interviews, selling tips and worksheets. Also, think about asking local experts in business to cover relevant topics. You could approach clients, or even prospects to help motivate & inform your team. Utilize your best sales performers to cover topics they excel in. Ask them to provide real client samples and case studies.
One successful Sales Program utilized Selling Power DVDs on cold calling & sales tips as well as reviewed best practice lists from top sales team members. They also arranged an in-house presentation from a local Bank Sales Executive, who discussed how to increase & leverage client touch points.
The key is to have a defined development program and hold the team accountable for learning and applying the desired skills by emphasizing these topics in your conversation and performance measures.
Can you afford to plan your Sales Team Training & Development? Can you afford not to?
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