Is Your Sales Team Ready To Deliver Sustainable Sales Growth?
By Joe Martas, NJMEP Account Manager
In my travels visiting many business owners of small and medium-sized companies, I find that many companies are faced with reduced sales, sometimes year after year, and are uncertain of what they can do to increase sustainable sales. Executives are sometimes unclear where to get choice advice or where to secure a “second opinion” before spending resources that may or may not work.
What works for manufacturers today is a process-oriented, systems approach to sales & marketing that is designed uniquely for each company.
This approach looks at critical areas that affect sustainable sales such as:
– Executive organization, goals, metrics and directions
– Channel strategy, performance, development
– Current products/services mix
– Customer mining – communications, satisfaction, best buyer profiles, suggestions
– Competition
– Positioning/branding
– Available resource talent
– Existing sales or market plans, if available
– Many other related topics
A viable integrated selling system offers the best chance for mid and long term sustainable sales.
To this regard, many companies have found that it is important for an unbiased, outside, seasoned expert to review a company’s current “selling system” to uncover areas of improvement that may lead to increased top-line sustainable sales growth.
Sales & marketing assessments require two sets of actions:
1. The expert needs to focus on as much information about a company as can be easily uncovered. This is done by:
- Pre-visit interview with some key research questions for executive team
- A face to face executive interview with select questions developed for that company/industry
2. The expert needs to analyze answers to questions and any/all offered information during the interview to arrive at recommendations.
Generally, the more that is known, the better will be the resulting recommendations. The final deliverable is an easy-to-read document that offers the most important sales & marketing activities, that will lead to increasing sustainable sales.
For more information on how NJMEP can help you with a sales assessment, contact Joe Martas at jmartas@njmep.org or (609) 649-9026.