Selling For Profit - Five Steps to Help You Focus on the Profitability of the Sale

1. Make Profit Important Get your people in line. All employees need to understand the rudiments of how they can behave profitably. Yes, you can behave profitably! Help all employees to have a regard for the costs they incur in their daily jobs. Share (in general terms) how much of the cost of running the business is represented in the cost of the product or service you are selling. Understand how easily this is given away due to inefficient behaviours, wastage, getting things wrong, letting customers down and so on. 2. Understand Costs As a business you need to know what to charge to cover all your costs and achieve your profitability targets. Whether you are charging for your time, a product or a service, you will need to know how to recoup all costs relating to making that product or service available and what profit margin will sustain your business. Check regularly what the costs of running your business are and your level of sales revenue. Then you can keep track of your viability as a business. It sounds simple and it is! Costs need to be in focus. 3. Define your Pricing Policy Define a process for managing the prices you charge. Many companies use an upper and lower limit as a guide for market pricing. Communicate clearly to your employees what their limits are and measure performance, rewarding good pricing management. It is too easy to let price slip when giving discounts and running promotions, so let employees know when they can stretch to their limits. Record your companies' adherence to pricing policy and take strong measures if you're letting good habits slip. 4. Find the right Price Position Find a position that sits well with your offer. Use the market as a guide in the first instance but intuitively you will know if your charges are about right for what you offer. You might consider the following three observations whilst deciding your price position: 1. Pricing is not going to differentiate your business. Service or quality will make you different, not price! 2. Prices, which to some look like good value, may look cheap to others. Not everyone likes cheap. 3. Try to be premium or low-cost; it's good to be one end of the scale rather than the middle. The centre ground can suggest no position at all! Find a price position and try it. If it doesn't work don't get stuck, look again and find another position that fits. 5. Understand your 'Hidden' Value Many products and services have become commodities and can become labeled with a price. Some businesses on the face of it do exactly what other businesses do. An accountant is an accountant after all. Not so! You may have to work hard to find differences but there will be some. Try hard to find these differences because you can charge for them! You may be bigger, smaller, faster or more experienced. You may wear the right kind of tie! Change your position to become the type of supplier they need. Your 'hidden' value is actually the ability to find what the client values most about your product or service. You will rarely need to be the cheapest if you can discover the 'hidden' value in your offer. KEITH PLACE DIRECTOROXFORD SALES CONSULTANTSHelping you to be better at selling - whatever you sell Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Keith_Place

What Can CRM Do For My Sales

Thanks to the large number of CRM software programs on the market today, most people have heard of CRM software. But many of those people have an incorrect or incomplete understanding of what CRM is capable of doing. This article will describe what CRM can do for your sales. After a brief overview of the concept of CRM, we'll identify some typical sales problems that CRM can solve. CRM became a buzzword in the 1990's. It referred to a technology-driven initiative to unify the efforts of a company's customer-facing departments. This new strategy would restructure these departments around the company's greatest asset - its customers! CRM would allow customer information from across the company to be available to any employee who happened to interact with the customer, enabling the sales team to sell more successfully, the marketing team to segment and market to customers more effectively, and the service team to provide more personal, more effective resolution to customer complaints or requests. Simply put, the technology available at the outset of CRM was insufficient to allow the concept to deliver on its promise. Today, however, the technology is available, and companies of every size and budget are realizing the benefits of CRM technology. Is your company one of them? Do you know what these benefits are? Why Do I Need CRM? Below are some typical problems that can be solved by implementing CRM.... "I want to improve the performance of my sales team this year." Well what do you mean, "improve?" How did you measure the performance of your sales team last year (meaning can you identify important metrics other than total revenue or number of sales)? Here are some specific questions you may ask yourself: o Can I identify the areas of performance in which my sales team did well, and those in which they underperformed? o Can I identify which of those areas has historically had the greatest impact on overall sales performance? o Which of those areas can be improved with the least investment of dollars, time, or training? o Which specific behaviors should I encourage to drive the performance increase I seek? For example, it may be that you had good lead generation and qualification numbers, but fell short in your more advanced sales stages. Or maybe your sales reps seemed to stall out in a certain part of your sale cycle, taking much longer than you would expect to achieve the objectives there and move into the next stage. There are many ways a sales team can underperform. But if you don't have a well-implemented CRM system, the odds are good that you can't accurately answer the questions that will help you improve. The truth is that measurable improvement can only come from measured results. Otherwise, your message to your sales team will continue to consist of frustrated admonitions to work harder or close better. "I think my sales team is doing a poor job of following up on the leads we receive, although I can't say for sure." There are two problems in this statement - the first is the suspicion that your valuable leads are falling through the cracks; the second is the fact that you can't measure the degree to which effective follow-up is occurring on the leads your team receives. CRM is designed to chain together a prospect's progress through the different stages of your sales efforts, from campaign to close. You can see exactly how many leads your sales team receives, and what actions are taken to pursue those leads. This information is available in high-level percentages and in detailed specifics about each lead. "I only know what's in the pipeline once a week - after spending hours calling my direct reports. By the time I'm done aggregating the data, things have probably changed anyway." It's hard to proactively manage your sales team in today's sales environment without knowing exactly how the pipeline for your team and for each rep looks. Identifying regions and reps that aren't performing well isn't possible without pipeline information. When this information is available real-time, you can use your valuable time for coaching and enabling your team rather than collecting their numbers. Opportunity management in CRM gives you and your sales reps and the ability to see what's in your pipeline in real-time. Information can be organized to show where each opportunity is in the sales stage, when it's expected to close, and what the rep expects it to be worth. Furthermore, if you know your sales process well enough to identify factors that indicate high chances of success or failure in an opportunity, certain opportunities can be flagged to help you take the necessary steps to close those deals or keep them from falling out of your pipeline. Over time and with enough accumulated pipeline data, you can begin to understand the probability related to pipeline values in different stages of your sales process. This understanding will help you forecast sales more accurately and identify the optimal pipeline numbers in each sales stage that will maximize pipeline through-put. "My sales reps don't execute the sales process properly. It's hard for me to identify the degree to which they're really following the process. It's also hard for me to mandate change in sales rep behavior." When CRM becomes the tool your sales team uses to manage the information relating to potential sales, it also becomes the medium through which you can mandate positive change. Your sales process can be integrated into the CRM system, allowing you to monitor the tasks and stages that each rep completes for each deal, or giving you high-level statistics to see the degree to which the sales process is being followed by your sales team as a whole. "My reps are not productive enough - they spend too much time doing things other than selling." CRM is designed to automate the tasks that take your reps away from selling. Whether it be · creating quotes or proposals · churning out follow-up communications · communicating internally with others involved in the sales process · saving or hunting for saved customer communications or the host of other tasks that cut into the time reps spend in front of potential customers, CRM can streamline or automate these tasks to free up more selling time for your sales team. "It takes too much time and effort for my reps to collaborate with other groups who could help in the sales process - we don't collaborate as much as we'd like to, and the collaboration we do engage in is inefficient." This is a CRM sweet spot. The whole concept of CRM is to allow information to flow across the enterprise in the instant it's created. Sales data will be made available to key players in your organization who can help move a sale to completion. This information flow can be automated, eliminating the need for manual communications. Tasks will be automatically created, both to remind your team members to complete assignments and to allow you to monitor and follow-up on tasks that aren't being completed. All of this drastically reduces the time your team needs to spend on the phone or sending emails to inform others of details relating to a sale. "My company's customer and prospect information is unreliable." Today is a great day to start reversing this trend. While you may or may not be able to improve the quality of the data you already have, you can certainly ensure that the customer data you create from now on will be complete and reliable. Good data keeping requires 2 things: a policy and a place. CRM gives you both. You define the policy by deciding what information is required for CRM records like accounts and contacts. Duplicate detection tools and other validation procedures defined by you can be created to ensure the purity and entirety of your customer data. And, of course, CRM is the place - the new center of all customer-facing information in your organization. by Andy Schultz Questions or comments? Invoc exists to help companies identify the ways CRM can contribute to measured, sustainable growth in sales, service, and marketing activities. Feel free to contact Invoc using the information below if you would like to explore the possibilities for CRM at your company. Invoc is a Microsoft Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. 713-240-3549 http://www.invoc.net info@invoc.net Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_B_Schultz

LinkedIn Discussion For Sales Managers - What Do You Do When HR Can't Find the Hunters You Need?

I recently posted this question on LinkedIn: Sales Managers: What do you do when your HR group isn't able to identify the hunters you need? With the incredible costs due to unfilled positions (customers going with the competition, RFPs not completed and generally missed sales opportunities), what do you (the sales manager) do to help HR see the need to use an outside source? I have 2 managers right now with open jobs, no real candidates in the pipeline and HR says that they want to fill the job internally. I got some really great answers from sales managers, business owners, recruiters, and HR people from around the country, and I thought the gist of the discussion was worth posting here for you. The general consensus seems to be that HR departments are difficult to work with on a candidate search because (1) there are often corporate politics coming into play, (2) HR doesn't have the expertise to handle finding specialized sales professionals, and (3) HR doesn't understand the true cost of a vacant position (and might not be all that interested). Especially if HR is working with a limited budget, they're not going to be interested in using an outside recruiting source-because they don't grasp the true cost of a vacant position to the company as a whole. So, they should stick to the onboarding portion of bringing in a new candidate. More than a few say that sales managers should just bypass HR entirely-because sales and marketing departments are much more equipped to recruit than HR departments, much more versed in what it is that they need in a new sales rep, and should already have an extensive network of sales reps to mine for their needs. (In some cases, these were also their arguments for not using a third-party recruiter.) Most importantly, if the sales manager is going to be held responsible for making the numbers, he or she shouldn't have to rely on another department to that extent for their team's success. My position is, of course, that sales managers make much more productive use of their time by working with the team they have in place to make the sales, and leaving the candidate search to a recruiter. The more money a manager generates in a normal cycle, the more it costs to use that time finding a new sales rep. And if recruiting isn't your business, you're almost never going to have access to the kind of candidate pool a recruiter has, no matter how extensive your professional network is-which means you'll be missing out on some very high-caliber talent. If the sales manager (or the HR department) has to run ads to find talent, that becomes a costly gamble which can easily bring you no results from your efforts. A good recruiting team saves time and money, while increasing productivity and sales force effectiveness. Peggy McKee is the CEO of PHC Consulting, an executive search firm that specializes in finding top sales, sales management, technical support and marketing talent for the medical and healthcare industries. We specialize in laboratory, medical device, healthcare IT, health care and hospital administration, and health care supply. Our clients include companies that are on the Fortune 5, 50, and 500 list, as well as Fortune 100 Fastest-Growing companies. Our clients' call points are the pharmacy, hospital administration, laboratory (both clinical and research), and the physician or surgeon. Our clients say that we provide the most pre-screened, pre-qualified candidates and talent that they receive. They love our follow-up, and they love the fact that we listen to what they truly need, and identify and exceed their goals in the candidate search. Our candidates say that we listen to what they are looking for in a career--that we help them find the best positions that are truly a long-term fit, and that we help make a stressful job search a little easier. See our website at http://www.phcconsulting.com. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peggy_McKee