After being in a business development role Peter Oliver leveraged Sandler for a successful career and had helped built a five-billion-dollar company. When he set out to start and own a business Sandler was a perfect fit.
Small business owners get into business for a reason; they are passionate, they are effective, but they don’t always expect the sales role to be a primary focus of their responsibilities and execution. Small business owners need to figure out how to connect with the marketplace and leverage their product or service for balanced business encounters.
Top five objectives for creating horse-power as a small business owner.
1. Template your Sales Process
2. Make Sure Your Goals Map to Your Daily/Weekly/Monthly Actions
3. Proactive Business Development
4. Track It with Consistency
5. Getting Unstuck from Tradition
We recommend upfront to template out the different steps of your sales process. 1 call to 6 call closes, completely disconnected from clients; each business should have a templated sales process to help communicate to individuals what the sales experience looks like. Sales processes are designed to favor the buyer when they are not templated from the experience of the business or the commodity.
Without a template, you might give away too much free information and end up doing consulting without revenue production which equates to giving away your time. The very best person to help you template your selling system is probably your client. You must have the emotional maturity and humility to be able to ask for this input and information.
Small business owners are generally smart, and they’re smart enough to know what they don’t know. The challenge is time. It’s the asset small business owners are trying to figure out how to leverage and how to delegate while retaining a lead on things to understand where the forward momentum of the business is taking the entire company.
People in business are likely good at big picture or detail and task-driven. Unfortunately, more o ften than not, there is likely a big black hole between goals and action. What we need to implement is a plan to fill the gap between goals and actions. In order to achieve goals we need to adjust actions. A lot of times people make lists unsure why or they have goals that they are unsure how to achieve.
What are the differences between leading and lagging indicators that help create daily plans to get results? Look to find and discover your top 3 money-making behaviors. These behaviors may result in discovery meetings which facilitate bringing someone through your selling process. If this activity leads to 1 out of 3 successful engagements then you need to prioritize these into daily ventures. These proactive activities should be evaluated by effectiveness and where activity needs improvement. A lot of times we make decisions based on comfort, not on priority or results. We need to look at ratios to understand the success difference between 2 hours of phone work versus a direct mail piece that costs money and time to produce.
It's important that people commit to proactive business development. Make sure you are in touch with your own personal why and know why you’re picking up the phone or networking. Create clarity to understand what the reasons are that motivate your daily behavior. Time blocking non-negotiable time to do the requisite behaviors for success. The difference of effectiveness between the top and the bottom earners of the PGA is .9 percent of a stroke. Focusing on creating a slight edge to motivate you to be on the top of your game will help you help your team lead them to success.
If your Sales Process is picking fruit off the ground then you’ll have a higher close percentage. We want to make sure we have the right amount of balance. The statistics of close are dependent on how quickly you want to grow and effectively you want to grow. A cookbook is a plan of success for executing your goals and mapping your future revenue. Determine what weekly actions you can do that can result in the lagging opportunities.
A big reason many business owners don’t make these changes is that they get stuck. We get stuck in our ways and develop something between amnesia and a blindspot. This can be caused by three reasons. Status quo—it’s how we’ve done it. Predictability—if an action is predictable we might continue to do it regardless of the success of the outcome. Comfort—our subconscious develops a comfort zone and we make a lot of decisions based on what is comfortable and not necessarily on what is important.
Developing five seconds of courage can help you get unstuck.
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