Commercially fit in 6 weeks time!
The past 20 years I assisted many companies in setting-up structured commercial performance improvement programs.
This allowed me to screen, optimize and recreate dozens of commercial strategies, organizations, performance based remuneration models, marketing plans and lead generation campaigns.
What always intrigued me is that so many companies seem to be happy with just sub-optimal commercial performance when they can do so much better.
The main reason for this is explained by a lack of a structured and creative approach to sales and marketing.
It is only by combining these two components systematic - structured and process based - and creative - innovative, agile and adapted to ever changing market conditions - that commercial excellence can be achieved.
"Commercially fit in 6 weeks time" is rapidly becoming the number one CPI-product.
More and more companies seem to discover that in the current economic climate just good is just not good enough. Not even when it comes to sales and marketing.
To get a company commercially fit in 6 weeks time some fast and dedicated action is required.
At the same time some misconceptions that hamper true commercial performance should be redressed.
The top 3 misconceptions about sales and marketing are :
- Every customer is a valuable customer
- The harder you work the more successful you will be
- Better start canvassing potential clients than wait for enquiries
Not every client is a valuable client. In every company you will find customers that cost more than they contribute. The identification and review of these customers is an essential component of any commercial dynamics program. This does not necessarily mean that you should dump your clients altogether. You can easily direct less productive customers to interaction systems where they no longer hamper your sales and service people, such as automated sales portals. You can than redirect the freed-up resources in sales and technical support to customers that do contribute significantly to sales volumes, margins and net earning.
The harder you work the more successful you will be. It would be nice. It would certainly be fair. Unfortunately it is not true when it comes to sales and marketing. This is no call for laziness but a call to spend more time on strategic analysis and thinking and less on traveling and visiting. A good sales person is not a hyperactive person it is a thinking person. There is nothing wrong with spending about half of your time on preparation and analysis if this doubles the chance of success in business development or quadruplicates the returns with existing customers.
In times of Adwords, search engine optimization, permission marketing and declining costs of advertising space companies are still too much into cold-calling on prospective clients in stead of using the available tools and concepts for lead generation. In a well organized team sales people follow-up on qualified leads generated by intelligent marketing programs and cold calling is a thing of the past.
When companies implement the above mentioned concepts and combine them with some simple principles on commercial automation, empowerment and motivational management, impressive results will show after a couple of weeks of dedicated application.
The key success factor in this kind of projects is the buy-in from management and staff. When we coach companies to get commercially fit in 6 weeks a large part of the coaching effort is related to cultural change en buy-in generation.
In many cases we have to convince the owners and senior managers to part with outdated visions on what a good sales and marketing process should look like.
"Improve the commercial performance of your company. Start with yourself." is a concept that is highly recommendable for many business owners and CEO.
This allowed me to screen, optimize and recreate dozens of commercial strategies, organizations, performance based remuneration models, marketing plans and lead generation campaigns.
What always intrigued me is that so many companies seem to be happy with just sub-optimal commercial performance when they can do so much better.
The main reason for this is explained by a lack of a structured and creative approach to sales and marketing.
It is only by combining these two components systematic - structured and process based - and creative - innovative, agile and adapted to ever changing market conditions - that commercial excellence can be achieved.
"Commercially fit in 6 weeks time" is rapidly becoming the number one CPI-product.
More and more companies seem to discover that in the current economic climate just good is just not good enough. Not even when it comes to sales and marketing.
To get a company commercially fit in 6 weeks time some fast and dedicated action is required.
At the same time some misconceptions that hamper true commercial performance should be redressed.
The top 3 misconceptions about sales and marketing are :
- Every customer is a valuable customer
- The harder you work the more successful you will be
- Better start canvassing potential clients than wait for enquiries
Not every client is a valuable client. In every company you will find customers that cost more than they contribute. The identification and review of these customers is an essential component of any commercial dynamics program. This does not necessarily mean that you should dump your clients altogether. You can easily direct less productive customers to interaction systems where they no longer hamper your sales and service people, such as automated sales portals. You can than redirect the freed-up resources in sales and technical support to customers that do contribute significantly to sales volumes, margins and net earning.
The harder you work the more successful you will be. It would be nice. It would certainly be fair. Unfortunately it is not true when it comes to sales and marketing. This is no call for laziness but a call to spend more time on strategic analysis and thinking and less on traveling and visiting. A good sales person is not a hyperactive person it is a thinking person. There is nothing wrong with spending about half of your time on preparation and analysis if this doubles the chance of success in business development or quadruplicates the returns with existing customers.
In times of Adwords, search engine optimization, permission marketing and declining costs of advertising space companies are still too much into cold-calling on prospective clients in stead of using the available tools and concepts for lead generation. In a well organized team sales people follow-up on qualified leads generated by intelligent marketing programs and cold calling is a thing of the past.
When companies implement the above mentioned concepts and combine them with some simple principles on commercial automation, empowerment and motivational management, impressive results will show after a couple of weeks of dedicated application.
The key success factor in this kind of projects is the buy-in from management and staff. When we coach companies to get commercially fit in 6 weeks a large part of the coaching effort is related to cultural change en buy-in generation.
In many cases we have to convince the owners and senior managers to part with outdated visions on what a good sales and marketing process should look like.
"Improve the commercial performance of your company. Start with yourself." is a concept that is highly recommendable for many business owners and CEO.
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