The High Cost of Missed
Opportunities
You may
find this hard to believe but there are “holes” in your
current selling process. Don’t worry though; even the best
sales organizations are not immune to this reality. In fact,
I’ve yet to see a company that doesn’t have any. It just
means that your salespeople are not operating at their peak
potential. No big deal right? Wrong. Your people are losing
sales they could be winning if someone was paying full time
attention to process.
Unfortunately, it's hard to stop the bleeding when you can't
find the cut—or worse yet—when you don’t even know there’s a
cut. Most companies don’t know where to start in trying to
find and identify the weaknesses and bottlenecks in their
sales process that are holding their people back. Do you?
Most companies don’t even know where to start. In that
sense, it’s easier to manage people than to engineer process
improvement. That's because it’s always easier to treat the
symptom than to actually diagnose and treat the underlying
cause of the problem. The result is a selling environment
where the true reasons for most failures and revenue
shortfalls go unnoticed and, as a result, unaddressed. After
all, the only behaviors and habits you can't change are
the ones you can't see.
On the
other hand, what kind of system do you have in place to
insure that the best practices in your selling process are
likewise being identified and duplicated across your entire
organization?
Just a few missed
opportunities a day multiplied across
your total sales force over a year’s time can
represent significant, if not devastating, losses. Of
course, like those paper cuts, this is hard to quantify
because most missed opportunity goes unnoticed and, as such,
does not lend itself to easy measurement. Unfortunately, if
it cannot be identified and measured it cannot be fixed.
Do You Know Where Your Sales
Come From?
When sales
are down, most managers fall back on what's easiest and most
familiar to them. For the most part that means they are
reduced to becoming high-priced cheerleaders, hoping the
salespeople can turn things around with some positive
attitude and encouragement. When that doesn't work, the same
salespeople who were regarded so highly when sales were up,
become scapegoats for a broken sales process. Because your
sales managers have no idea which specific actions and
behaviors lead to success, and advances within the overall
process, they don't know where to look or what to do to fix
things. What you're left with is something I call
management by anecdote. That is, you're left with
stories from your salespeople regarding individual
prospects and situations and why those sales never
materialized.
Companies
who operate this way often find themselves grappling with
the same basic problems year after year with the only change
being the people doing the grappling. Let's face it, it's
always going to be easier to blame your people than it is to
help them succeed by taking control of a broken process and
managing it for maximum return. It’s an ineffective and
expensive proposition that leads to the added cost of
turnover, recruiting, hiring, and training new people, and
inevitably repeating the process over and over.
This is how most
companies lose revenue and market share.
Maximize ROI With Sales
Process Management From GWK Rainmaker
Sales
Process Management Consulting from GWK Rainmaker will give
you a working knowledge of your current selling process.
First, we'll break down your sales process into its
component pieces. Then we'll analyze them in terms of
efficiency, cost, and effectiveness. Doing this will help us
gain an understanding of the real reasons your people close
sales, and the reason they lose sales. It will uncover the
strengths and weaknesses within your system so we can
emphasize, teach, and coach those behaviors that produce
successful outcomes and duplicate them across your entire
sales team while, at the same time, eliminating or
minimizing the things that aren't working.
Once
we’ve identified the strengths and weakness in your process,
the next step is to measure them so that we can establish a
system of metrics that will serve as a benchmark for future
growth as we implement continuous process improvements.
These standards will be valuable in helping to insure
consistent performance today while empowering new growth
tomorrow. Sales Process Management is a never-ending cycle
of improvement that will lead to incredible increases in
productivity, sales, and revenue, while substantially
lowering your cost of sales.
Call me today at 817-776-5325
or
Click Here to Schedule Your Free Consultation
Increase Your Sales
Immediately