Here, Thomas Baumgartner provides five strategies that the world’s best sales practitioners use to create growth in any market.
Strategy #1: Find Growth Before Your Competitors Do
The first way to find growth is to look ahead of your competitors towards what the market will want in the future. You should be looking at technological, political, geographical, and regulatory trends. You can also look to “mine growth beneath the surface”. This is about finding small pockets of growth that collectively deliver real impact. Finally, you can also “find growth in big data”. This means analyzing your data in your decision-making process and finding growth in unexpected places.
Strategy #2: Sell the Way Your Customers Want
How do your customers want to buy from you? This isn't a simple question to answer so in order to answer it you’ll want to utilize multichannel sales. To do this you'll have to integrate online and offline experience and understand how your customer makes decisions. For example, at a car dealership, a customer will probably research models and prices online, then head into the dealership for a test drive.
Strategy #3: Soup Up Your Sales Engine
“Souping up your sales engine” is all about designing sales processes that support your sales team. One thing you can do to increase your sales engine is to “tune your sales operations for growth.” This means above all, letting your sales teams use more of their time to sell. One company found that sales reps were spending only 35% of their time actively selling. Once the company implemented solutions to cut down on non-sales-related activities, they found instant sales growth.
Strategy #4: Focus on Your People
It's easy to sometimes forget that we are dealing with human beings. Therefore, It makes sense that you also need to focus on your people in order to create sales growth. One thing you can do is to “manage performance for growth.” To do this properly, you’ll need to create a few key mindset changes. One mindset is that coaching is an absolute necessity for growth. Second, you need to set the tempo. Frequent meetings allow you to address issues and place corrective actions. Finally, realize it isn’t all about pay. Non-cash rewards can be just as if not more effective.
Strategy #5: Lead Sales Growth
The only way to generate the growth that you and your team are looking for is to drive it from the very top. The most successful leaders focus on a few specific things in order to make this happen. First, they challenge the status quo. Always have the courage to challenge convention. Doing this will ensure long-term growth. Second, galvanize your sales team. You will need your team to buy in over the long run in order to see growth. Do this by painting a simple and compelling vision of the future. Finally, leaders need to demand results. You need to realize that in order to generate results, you need to be very specific about what you’re trying to achieve.