Isn’t it time there was a little more joined up thinking in support for small businesses?

Why is money for enterprise not invested in areas where enterprise produces the best returns?

Today’s announcement of the second round of enterprise zone investment was disappointing for those who believe that this investment needs to be placed in areas where the best returns can be had.

The government, in its wisdom, has agreed to the plans of a number of organisations for the creation of Enterprise Zones in a variety of areas. The majority of this investment is going to areas where arguably there is not the culture of enterprise and entrepreneurship. One enterprise zone that has been agreed is in Oxfordshire, David Cameron’s back yard!

And yet one of the most deprived areas of the country believe it or not is Bognor Regis, a town known for its long hours of sunshine and very high unemployment rates. The Coast to Capital LEP put forward a plan for the establishment of an advanced manufactiuring Enterprise Zone for this area and it was rejected.

On another note, another of the new business support operations, StartupBritain, is organising a bus tour around various regions to help encourage support and provide help and advice to potential start-ups in various parts of the country. Whilst in itself this appears to be a useful exercise, I am lost to understand why there will only be two visits to Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire areas but these are closed to the public at large. One of these is a visit to a college outside Brighton and the other is to an office of Nokia in Hampshire to help employees with their start-up plans. These counties have a greater number of start up businesses than anywhere else outside London, but again no real support.

Isn’t it time there was a little more joined up thinking in support for small businesses and to encourage entrepreneurship?

Sales Performance Improvement

Each year companies need to improve their performance in sales not only because of cost pressures but more importantly because they will lose between 5-20% of their customer base each year. This means that in 3 years they will be less than half the size they are now if they do nothing else!

Due largely to companies going into receivership, mergers and takeovers or exit, it is nonetheless a critical factor in the success or otherwise of any business. Just to stand still every company needs to find more business from existing customers as well as finding new ones. The need to improve sales performance is self evident.

Under these circumstances most business owners exhort their sales staff to work harder as if somehow doing more of the same thing will result in better figures when doing more of the same thing brings in more of the same results. It is important to recognise the need to work smarter and not necessarily harder.

So how can we bring about these “smarter” results?

There are a number of areas that can be considered in improving sales performance, not all of them may apply to your situation.

• Focus

Are your sales staff focusing on the right customers with the right products? Do they assess customers and prospects potential? Or do they rely on what they did in the past?

• Motivation.

It is important that they understand their role in the business. Often this is not the case. If in doubt ask them! The vision you have for the company should be shared by everyone to promote involvement and motivation.

• Objectives

Their objectives should be aligned with that vision. It is surprising how many companies do not do this. For instance, there was one case where a company needed growth but the sales team were targeted with maintaining existing customer business.

• Cross-Sell and Up-sell

Every opportunity should be taken to cross-sell and up-sell. Cross-selling (other products) and up-selling (superior product, higher grade service) increase the take from the customer for little or no increase in costs of selling to that customer.

• Skills

Ensure the sales force is trained in the latest sales techniques because you can be sure the buyer is trained in how to combat them! Training, development and reinforcement of the skills they learn as well as feedback on their performance is vital to ensure that you are getting the best out of the work force

• Prospecting

Does the sales team spend time on prospecting? This is the feedstock of your sales pipeline. If they do not, you are running on empty. Do they know which markets to tackle, where and what type of customer the company needs.

• Needs and Offer

Do your sales team identify you customers’ needs or do they just sell the features of the product or service? Do they consider the whole of your offer or just the products and services? In many cases customers are persuaded not just by the product but by other items such as delivery, terms and conditions or just want to deal with you!
There are of course many other areas to be discussed in an article such as this but simply asking yourself and your team the questions posed above will put you and your business on the road to Sales Performance Improvement.

Metrics in Sales Management

One way to look at the performance of sales personnel particularly those on the road is to establish a series of metrics that give the manager a good idea of what and how they are doing BEFORE the results come in. Typically a sales manager on seeing below target results will exhort his teams to ‘get out there and redouble your efforts’ as if doing more of the same thing will improve results.

Typically the metrics for sales people involve three main areas:

•  The quality of what they are doing.
  This comes down to their skill levels and understanding of what is expected of them. Have the team been adequately trained and are they putting into practice regularly what they have been taught?
•    The efforts they put in.
  This is the more traditional measurement of the number of sales visits they make but should also include areas such as numbers of telephone calls, emails, and mailshots and many more
• Who their customers and prospects are.
  Measurement of the types of prospects and customers is essential so that considerable effort is not expended on the low profitability customers or those whose long term potential to the company is small. Segmenting by size of company and potential and then providing targets for sales staff will help achieve these goals.

Other metrics to consider are the number of new customers required each period to achieve goals (consideration of average size and average order come in here.) We have already indicated that the profitability of each customer and the potential for each prospect is also a metric that can be used.

Are the team selling the right mix of products or services in order to meet the goals of the company? Some may be more profitable than others or more difficult to obtain stretching lead times which in turn may result in a poorer performance.

By setting a series of goals and devising a range of metrics or KPIs the future performance of a sales person can be accurately predicted. This feed forward approach will allow the manager to make corrections before the rot sets in and declining sales results appear 6 months or more down the line.

Transactional and Consultative Selling- What Are They?

There is no one ‘style’ of selling. Every business develops its own style often tied to the processes that grow up over a period of time based on custom and practice. Some styles evolve with time and others remain stuck in the past with consequences for the company concerned. However all these various styles can be put into groups that can be loosely characterised as either consultative or transactional selling.

Over time selling has evolved. Early in the last century there was the CRAB technique (Call, Reel off a joke, Ask for the Order, Blow.) After that came the FAB (Feature advantage Benefit) approach which was a more considered and much more successful way of closing business. At the end of the last century this changed into the Consultative method of selling.

Transactional selling was all about closing the order there and then and typically involved negotiation with the buyer on price with little interaction with others in the company. Therefore highly trained sales people were unable to use their well tuned sales techniques as they tended to be talking not to decision makers but influencers at best. (This is not true of all industries but it is certainly true of most in all parts for the world.) In the transactional world then there was minimal competition and frequently the transactional sales person was termed perhaps unfairly as an order taker. This was in the good old days of a seller’s market.

The move to consultative selling was created by the development of more and more competition, much more savvy buyers and the need to influence the decision makers at an earlier stage in the sales process.

Consultative selling can be defined as the process of developing a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s business and industry, defining needs at a strategic level and offering solutions that will help the customer address their unique objectives. As can be seen from this definition we are not talking here about an old fashioned order taker. Here we need a different animal who is more a business development manager or key account manager and who has business as well as sales acumen.

In the modern era when products (and services to a certain extent) have to conform to international standards and when numerous companies make almost identical products selling at the same price other differentiators come into play. The successful sales person understands that price alone is not the only criteria for decision making and will work closely with all decision makers and influencers to achieve their goals.

Why We Should Embrace Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the latest buzz words in business today. But what is sustainability as applied to businesses and isn’t it an unnecessary additional cost?

Sustainability in most people’s eyes is about ‘green’ issues. Phrases such as global warming, carbon footprint, energy reduction all spring to mind but sustainability when applied to a business should be a business philosophy and strategy. One definition of sustainability is that it is the process of protecting your business from the risks of today, and ensuring that your business can respond to the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. This can encompass for instance embracing the challenges of changing technology, reducing waste, streamlining supply chains and many other processes.

So what are the benefits of a sustainability strategy?

A Carbon Trust report carried out by McKinsey shows that businesses adopting a sustainable strategy can drive business value by up to 80%. Indeed it also shows that failing to implement these policies and practices does serious damage to your business and can reduce its value by 65%.

The UK Climate Change & Sustainability report on spending over the next 3-5 years shows that this market will grow rapidly expecting a 14% increase in spending by 2013. This can provide a substantial growth opportunity for those willing to develop this market.

Businesses in general pay for over 30% more energy than they need. This 30% is wasted through buildings, machinery and process that are not optimally designed for peak efficiency. With increasing cost of energy this will increasingly become a substantial burden on business.

More and more buying organisations from Government departments to big business require their suppliers to be sustainable and be able to show their credentials in this area before they will do business.

Whilst there may be some initial additional costs in order to develop a sustainable strategy it can be seen that the benefits are substantial and will easily outweigh any costs.

Google Changes are Important for Businesses on the Web

Businesses looking for leads via search engines should be aware of the changes that Google has recently made says UK Business Advisors (UKBA). These changes affect how companies and their web sites are rated by Google which accounts for 87% of UK web searches.

Google makes on average around 400 changes to its method of indexing and ranking websites every year to provide higher quality results to its users. The most significant recent change is the increasing emphasis on search results tailored to every individual user, based on what they have searched for before, and their known location. Google is increasingly focusing on returning local results which increases the importance of an optimised business listing in Google Places (formerly Google maps).

Another major change Google made at the beginning of last year is to index Twitter and Facebook social media sites in near real-time. For certain combinations of words and phrases this displays Tweets and Facebook posts on page one. However once these news items have aged a few hours they gradually disappear from the search results.

Outdated and outmoded SEO techniques that used to work just a year ago can get a business website banned. When employing an SEO expert, a business needs to be convinced that they are fully aware of the latest ethical and legal techniques.

Greg Spence, a search engine specialist in UKBA advises, “It is important that if companies rely on search engine rankings they take advice from people who keep up to date with the latest Google changes. Things that worked a few years ago can now damage your ranking and completely new actions can have a major positive impact.”

Control the Controllables

In business there are many things that can upset the equilibrium of a company and that will include both internal and external events. Some of these such as the economy, competitors and even clients we can have very little control over. Our focus must remain on the things we do have control over. In other words “Control the Controllables.”

These words were said by Amy Williams, Gold Medal Winner at the Vancouver winter Olympics 2010 in the Skeleton event. For the uninitiated the skeleton event is sliding down a an icy hill at up to 90 mph on a tea tray head first!

Amy Williams with Olympic Gold Medal and SGBA Members Geof Steward and Bob Francis

To get the gold medal Amy said that she had to control the controllables and make tiny changes to help her improve. This included the controversial design of her helmet, down to her body temperature prior to the start of the event. Research had shown that her body performed best at slightly above normal body temperature so Amy wore a thermal wrap (like we see marathon runners wearing after they have completed their run) under her jacket for the period immediately before the start. Research had also shown that muscles recover more effectively if cooled down rapidly after her event. This required Amy to immerse herself in freezing water for a number of minutes after each race. Amy acted on all of the research and guidance provided and the results spoke for themselves!

The lesson here is that no matter what business you are in small improvements can make all the difference.