7 Steps to Create a Sales System for Growth
When revenues go flat, most CEOs want to hire salespeople. Instead, create a sales system that can scale.
As a strategic growth coach, I've worked with dozens of leadership teams to help them grow and scale their businesses. While there are many challenges these companies face, growing revenue is generally at the top of the list. Without more sales volume, it's impossible to scale a business effectively.
Too often, however, when I first speak with CEOs about how they've tried to grow sales, I hear horror stories about hiring expensive salespeople, sometimes several, who made big promises but failed to deliver. Honestly, I made the same mistake myself more than once.
The fact is that a hired gun is unlikely to accelerate sales, even if they have an existing book of business. Who you sell to, what you sell, and why customers buy will dramatically differ from business to business. So, a salesperson who's crushed it with one company doesn't guarantee they will crush it at yours, despite what they promise.
The solution is to focus on creating a strategic sales system that targets your specific ideal customer, positions your product or service correctly, and closes deals consistently. Once you have a system in place, you can begin scaling and optimizing it to grow your business.
Here are the key steps I focus on when working with my clients to build an effective, repeatable, and scalable sales system.
1. Identify your target customer
Start by articulating your target customer. I like looking not only at demographics but also at psychographics and buying motivators. The better you understand your customer, their situation, why they are buying, what criteria they use, and their buying process, the better you can design your system to support your customer's needs.
2. Define your value proposition
Without a clearly differentiated market position, you'll be competing on price, which is a bloody and painful battle to be in. Instead, find two to three buying factors you can focus on and hone your products and services to be exceptional in those attributes. A unique product or service will be more valuable for your target segment, allowing you to charge a premium price and create more profit opportunities.
3. Develop lead generation strategies
Too often, I see companies randomly trying lead generation tactics without a strategy or system for measuring success. When something doesn't immediately lead to more sales, they drop it and try something else. Instead, ask yourself where your ideal customers will likely be looking for solutions, what content and assets you have to leverage, and which utilize your natural skills and capabilities as a company.
If everyone in your company hates public speaking, then that's not a good approach. However, maybe you have a strong vendor network and can create an effective affiliate sales program. The point is to create leverage based on your unique situation and measure success, not just copy what everyone else is doing.
4. Map out your sales process
Once you have a lead, you must know how to move them through a structured sales process. You can't close a deal until you've developed trust and understood the customer's needs. You also want to create clear stages that can be reviewed and improved. While it can feel a little rigid at times, it's the only way you'll be able to track results and create a predictable system.
5. Measure and improve
The next step is to measure and improve the system. Tracking numbers and keeping good notes will be key to making adjustments. Don't be afraid to experiment and try new things, just keep track of the metrics to know what worked and what didn't. Oftentimes, little changes to the early stages can lead to big changes in conversion rates and increase efficiencies.
6. Standarize and systemize
Once you've identified processes that work, find ways of standardizing and systemizing them. Make a checklist for scoring leads, create standard questions to ask, set requirements for leads to advance, etc. While you need to balance the rigidity of your system with the need to innovate, I find most companies aren't structured enough.
7. Train and improve
Finally, once you have a system that works, you can then identify key roles, skills, and experience requirements you can use to hire, train, and develop good salespeople. The big win here is that with a well-defined sales system, you can generally hire less experienced people who have the specific skills you need. This will save you money on salaries, onboarding, and training.
While there is an art to closing deals, creating a sales system can take a lot of guesswork and variability out of the process. You'll need to hire salespeople to grow your business, but don't expect them to be a silver bullet. Instead, create a system that produces consistent rules. Then you can drop the pedal and fuel your growth.
