Ian’s top 5 takeaways for growing sales revenue (liveshow)
If you want to grow sales revenue, relying on sales results won’t be enough. On Wednesday June 22nd I spoke with Jonathan Hubbard, CEO at sales performance app Numerik, to share my approach for growing sales revenue based on The 6 Fundamentals. Let’s quickly look at the key points from our conversation, and the actions you can integrate into your sales team to really influence sales results.
Watch the full liveshow here:
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Top 5 takeaways for growing sales revenue
Understand which sales activities lead to success
Unless your sales reps understand which sales activities lead to booked meetings and closed deals, they’ll struggle to influence end sales results.
You can start influencing sales results today by ensuring reps know which activities lead to success and how much they need to achieve each day. Let’s say your reps need to hit a $100k sales target, and they know that 50% of proposals succeed. From here, you can work out how many other activities your team will need to achieve each day to secure enough proposals to reach your target.
Now that you’ve defined the right activities, you can then look at where your reps should be doing them.
2. Polish your existing customers
Based on the 4th Fundamental, where to do it, polishing your existing customers is all about nurturing growth opportunities.
Once you know which sales activities lead to success, you’ll need to build an understanding of each customer’s importance to your business, and their growth potential. Using a ranking system based on a customer’s importance/potential (e.g. Platinum, gold, silver, bronze) you can track a customer’s performance over time, slowly building up a picture of those who have greater potential, and those who’ve reached their limit.
After identifying which customers are ready for nurturing, make sure you’ve got systems in place which’ll help reps execute successful sales activities for each customer.
3. Know who’s who in the zoo: key account contacts
A rep can polish an existing customer all they want, but if they aren’t talking to the right person, they’ll be leaving money on the table.
To help your sales reps get their deals across the line, you can use a key contact matrix. Encourage your reps in calls/meetings to ask who else they should be talking to. It can be Simple as asking 'this deal that we're trying to get over the line...who else do I need to be talking to about it? Once they’ve found out who the key decision makers are, make sure their contact details are documented.
You can use my key contact matrix here to get started.
4. Identify hidden sales opportunities
Flowing on from the right activity, where to do it, and knowing the right people, we can then start looking for whitespaces: sales opportunities.
Reps can get started by looking at their top customers, and mapping out which products each customer purchases. You may have 6 products on your market, and find that top customers are only purchasing 4 of them, and getting the remaining 2 from your competition. With these whitespaces recognised, you can help your reps plan the next steps needed to secure that business e.g. nurturing the customer, making sure you’re maximising the amount of problems being solved for them.
Start mapping out whitespaces with this template.
5. Grow sales like mold: customer referrals and sales advocates
Besides boosting end sales results, developing customer relationships has another benefit: referrals and advocacy.
With a great relationship as a base, it’s simple for reps to ask customers about other businesses who’d appreciate your products, and develop low cost case studies for sharing with other customers. With enough support and polishing, your existing customers can even become advocates for your business.
A simple way of putting this is to grow mold: mold grows and spores right next to each other, and so do great sales!
Ultimately, we can’t influence our results without first considering what we’re doing, and where we’re doing it. Many of the principles touched on in Numerik’s liveshow are also in my book, which you can purchase here.