Perhaps you know that one of The Whale Hunters key principles is that sales is 90% process and 10% magic, not the other way around. It is true. To help turn that concept into a real tool you can use, here are three steps to a more efficient sales process.
Conversation with Chris Baggott about "The Key to Fast Growth is Discoverability."
Nothing is more critical to the sustainable success of a business than its abilities to galvanize the organizational team around their accountabilities for growth. While so many businesses place a high emphasis and dependence upon the functional responsibility of the sales teams for their growth, sustainable businesses recognize that increases in revenues are best accomplished through the retention of existing clients and the efficiency with which their team attracts and converts new clients. Sustainable revenue growth is about focusing on developing and maintaining great relationships that add value to the firm and to the client. That is not a sales function—it is an organizational accountability.
Whale Hunting is a great strategy to grow your company fast. But even fast-growing companies make on average 80% of their revenue from existing clients. So it’s much more important to keep existing whales than to hunt for new ones. How do you find out if there is a high probability that existing whales will work with you next year, too?
When you combine expert facilitation with visual representations of the outcomes that were achieved in a collaborative manner, you have a living reminder of the work you accomplished together. And most important, you have a map that you can use to help the rest of your employees understand why it is important to change the way the company is doing something.
Each month we do our Expert Series call focused on growth and sales for small and medium sized businesses. This month, on July 20th at 12pm Eastern, we’re doing our free call with Compendium CEO, Chris Baggott .
Earlier this week, in the blog post by @jolewitz he talks about how critical people are to a business’ success. In the comments he and @RaynaNyc talked about how your team is one of the biggest unique selling propositions (USP). It’s so true, and it got me thinking.
The “grey matter” of your team is what matters.
Many managers (whether in small, mid-sized or large businesses) who survived the very difficult last few years are working hard to come back strong. You may currently be: restructuring, hiring new talent, revitalizing your marketing plan, becoming more creative with staff resources and how best to maximize them, all while making the best of technology from the Internet to mobile to social media and various data analytics tools.
My advice if you would like to transcend the competitive landscape is to think about Intentional Growth™ and create a plan to establish, highlight, and promote how you are unique as you grow into the future. The critical word here is “grow” and the focus of this post is how your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) will support and fuel that growth.
Once upon a time, businesses everywhere searched high and low for the right big account. They marched through the forest and didn’t see the trees. They scoured the earth and met with saber-toothed tigers and vicious lions that sent them scurrying back to their caves. They set out day after day with great optimism only to return home with little or no luck. Until one day, they looked out across the wide ocean and asked, “How do the ancient traditions of sea-faring nations feed and clothe their families during the long and arduous winters?” And they discovered the key of Whale Hunting!
A lot of small companies adopt a mantra of “Think Big, Act Big” as a way to motivate everyone towards growth. It’s an amazingly common attitude. Donald Trump claims he invented the “Think Big” phrase. New Zealand thinks their prime minister invented it. It’s the title of a really bad movie. So I don’t really know where it comes from, […]
We came home from the grocery with a little mesh package of new red potatoes. Also a package of baby portabella mushrooms. Planned to use them on the same day; did not demand that they stay fresh for even three days (although that wouldn’t be too much to expect, would it?)
As I started assembling the roast pork tenderloin dinner, I discovered that the potatoes were rotten. Not just mildly old—completely unusable. All of them. So good husband returned to the supermarket to get replacements. A few minutes after he left, I opened the portabellas. Whew! Old. Unacceptable. So from a very expensive, high-end so-called “luxury” grocery store, I had two high-priced items on the same day that were unfit to eat. From a provider whose minimum requirement should be “food that is fit to eat on the day you buy it.”
When I started in “sales”, I didn’t want the word sales in my title. In 1993, I graduated from Architecture school and took a job as “Sales Engineer” for a custom returnable packaging company. Yes – I was responsible for selling, but I never really saw myself as a salesperson. I saw myself more as a “figure out a way to solve customer problems in a way that my company could make money” person. This became especially true as I grew in responsibility to become a business manager and owner of my own businesses. Here are three lessons I’d like to shar