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Monday, December 05, 2011
It's that time of the year where everyone starts predicting the sales trends for 2012.
The latest article to catch my eye, Barrett's The 12 Sales Trends of 2012, has the overall theme of "Adapt or Perish", which I think pretty much sums it up.
It's a lot like the theme I developed in this post last month.
Picking through the 12 sales trends covered most are part of the ongoing evolution (or should it be revolution) in sales that's been brought about by "search" and the internet. This has been the single most disruptive force in sales aver the last 10 years.
When I say disruptive, that's not a criticism, I'm talking in terms of how search has completely changing the B2B sales landscape.
It's what the article points to as "A seismic shift in the way we sell".
In the 21st century business is more about questions than answers; more about thinking than action; more about people than capital. 2012 is about getting your house in a new order because the world changes yet again and we need to change with it.
Transactional salespeople, or "order takers" have basically been replaced by ecommerce. Every aspect of sales has gone higher up the food chain, which is reflected in a number of the trends outlined including "the polarisation of buying and selling".
Your sales team today are no longer just "closers", they're facilitators.
Other trends look at improving efficiency of selling, through better CRM, targeting and segmentation and reducing expensive sales resources, such as "Field sales team numbers to halve".
It's now all about getting more from less, which is basically what every business needs to consider.
As the article concludes, "Buyers are in the driver’s seat"
Labels: b2b sales, crm, revenue improvement, sales, sales consultancy  
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Although I didn't realise it at the time, I took
my first "consulting" role over 10 years ago when I joined
a company to turnaround declining revenues within their service
division.
What I thought was simply a sales management role
was actually a challenging change management project as I had to
increase revenues through transforming the structure of both the team
and the service proposition.
The first thing I did when I started was really
dig into the figures to see what was happening. Whilst everyone I
spoke with thought that the problem was simply down to poor sales
performance, in fact it actually due to the fundamental structure of
the division and it's service offering.
Without going into the details, the service
division was structured in such a way that it's people were
compensated contrary to increasing revenue. Plus, instead of working
in conjunction with the capital equipment division (which had
traditionally sold the equipment maintained by the service division)
they had completely opposed sales structures leading to new equipment
being sold that was actually serviced by another company at a cheaper
price than their own service division.
Believe me, you could not make it up.
Once this was realised, the changes I put in place
quickly reversed revenues which had been declining for over 5 years.
Over the next 3 years, in a company that was
struggling and constantly striving for performance gains post-MBO, I found myself
sat around the boardroom with the CEO looking at other "projects"
to generate sales growth and revenue improvement. The common theme was that these were all projects
which aimed to unlock hidden revenue within the business.
Handing them to the Sales Director or one of their
team wouldn't work. Either they were too close to the issue or they
simply couldn't afford to turn their attention from hitting sales
targets. What the CEO needed was a business consultant. In
a larger corporate it would have been a business analyst or someone
in the CEO's strategy team. But this was a 250 employee SME... so it
was me.
Often the projects ran across different divisions,
and required a more holistic approach unencumbered by company
politics.
Examples of where hidden revenue can be found
within a business include:
cross division offerings - you can
unlock significant revenue opportunities by combining service
offerings from two autonomous business units. One company I worked
with had separate consumable and equipment divisions who never
combined their offerings because of internal structures, leaving
money on the table which their competitors exploited.
It's true that the problems of silo's usually
occur within larger businesses (both the examples and the original
company I mentioned were companies with between 220-500 employees)
but there are also examples of hidden revenue within smaller
businesses, which include:
Not exploiting all opportunities within
existing accounts - do you know which customers are part of
larger groups? Are you in contact with all potential buyers within
the same account? For example, if you sell training services and you
only deal with HR what happens if the Sales Director buys a training
programme elsewhere? Are you sure you will always be asked? Most decisions in larger companies involve more than one person, often 4 or 5; are you in contact with all of them? Do you even know them all?
Not catching up with dormant accounts
- if you're a project based business, are you keeping up with every
account? If your contacts move on, are you following them, and are
you in front of their replacement? This is a common problem for
business owners who are focused on delivery and let accounts go
cold. It's not your customer's responsibility to tell you; it's no
good moaning that old so-and-so never called you - you need to call
them (or at least get one of your business development team to give
them a regular nudge).
Consider everything within you business as an
asset. That's your people, your existing customers, your lapsed
customers, your prospect database, your accounts history...
everything. Ask yourself, are you really leveraging every asset in
your business?
If you look a little deeper, and often with a
fresh, outsider's perspective, you may find that significant revenue
opportunities are right in front of you. Labels: business development, business development consultancy, sales consultancy, sales consultants
Posted by: David Regler @ 7:47 pm |
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Sunday, January 13, 2008
I think one of the most critical parts of any sales consulting project is defining the output... or "what success looks like". Without a clear idea of how the sales consulting project will be a success, before you start it, it's almost impossible to judge what value has been delivered. Unlike selling, which is always measured by one metric - revenue - a consulting project is too short in duration to deliver immediate revenue results. Being clear about what else would be a success for the project is essential before undertaking an sales consulting assignment. Here are two examples, one good, one bad from our experience. Poorly defined - we undertook a sales consulting engagement with a start-up that had just secured it's first round of funding. As with many start-ups, the goal is always changing, but in this particular situation we started our project just prior to a key member of the management team arriving. Needless to say, as soon as she started the new Director had her own ideas and the scope of work changed instantly resulting in a new project hurriedly outlined. Since we were already hired for the gig, we continued but the results were not to our satisfaction. With hindsight, we should have resigned the account immediately. However, when the project was completed we declined an offer for further work. Well defined - at the other end of the spectrum (and I'm pleased to say we have more examples in this camp) we were hired to research and profile UK resellers for a large international company. The brief was clearly outlined and, with our client, we defined the metrics necessary for success. In this case, our main deliverable was to map the reseller landscape for competitor and complimentary vendors and score them to identify companies that our client's Business Development team should approach. We executed the consulting project on time, to spec and delivered the report as defined. Taking the time to clearly define the output for any sales consulting project is an essential step. Success can always be described in many ways other than revenue. And whatever the definition of success is, having it agreed from the outset will always make it more likely to be achieved. Labels: sales consultancy, sales consulting
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