“To my customer: I may not have the answer, but I'll find it. I may not have the time, but I'll make it. I may not be the biggest, but I'll be the most committed to your success.” - Unknown

Last weekend I took my two boys out for pizza to a new gourmet takeaway pizza place that has recently opened in our neighbourhood. My youngest son does not like to have pizza sauce on his pizza. So when I ordered I asked the young lady taking the orders if she would be able to arrange a ½ and ½. Half with sauce and half without.

“No, we don’t do ½ and ½’s “ she told us. She may just as well have said, “we don’t want your business, it’s just too fussy!”

Needless to say we left and went to find another pizza place that were more than happy to take our “fussy” order.

This is an obvious situation whereby I could have been helped but wasn’t. There are times however, where the customer comes in looking for a particular item which we just don’t have. What then? What do you do when you cannot immediately satisfy the customer’s need, because perhaps your store has sold out or does not stock a particular item, or the customer needs the next size up and you don’t have it?

Lets face it, no customer ever likes to hear the word “No”! This is a word that they believe is their exclusive domain. Despite this, many ‘average’ retail sales people simply say, “no” to the customer “No, I am sorry but we don’t stock anything like that here.” Saying no to a customer means that the money invested to bring that customer in to the store has just gone to waste.

According to the late Sam Walton founder of Wal-Mart “there is only one boss - the customer - and he/she can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Would you say no to your boss? The chances are great that you wouldn’t (assuming that the request was not totally unreasonable). When you say “no” to the customer you become part of their problem and not their solution.

When I work with retail store managers, we teach them that they are the only ones that should say no to a customer if circumstance or company policy dictates. Did you know that the Norwegian word for sale is derived from the word selje, which means to serve? It is part of the sales person’s role to find a way to say YES!

Make a decision that you will never say “no” to a customer no matter what. Decide that you will always attempt to show them alternative products or help them find an alternative solution, which they may not have known even existed. When you follow this approach it saves both you and the customer time, effort and in some cases money.

Never saying no also means that you can manage to meet the customer’s requirements and can still keep them as happy customers. When you say no you risk the customer finding the item in another store and thereby losing out on a sale. Remember the maxim: “If we don't take care of the customer... somebody else will!”

As we said in the beginning of this 3-part blog series, in these challenging economic times, as sales leaders, we will need to get a whole lot smarter and more shrewd if we are going to keep our existing customers and win the few opportunities that are still out there to be had!

The 3 key strategies that sales leaders must adopt if they are to make headway in these circumstances are, in summary:

1. Regular Sales Performance coaching, one on one, by phone or in person, with each member of your sales team, no less than once per fortnight. See the first blog in the series - Three Strategies Sales Leaders Must Employ to Get Sales Firing Again. 

2. The second strategy was to look for sales closest to the “bulls-eye” – go where the money is. See the Blog number two in the series - Stratgey Number 2 to Get Sales Firing Again. 

Today’s Blog covers the third strategy.

Strategy # 3 - Re-engineer your current sales process

Go to work and re-engineer your current sales process, if you have one. If you don’t then get one! The latest research from the CSO Insights' 2008 Sales Performance Optimization Report shows that 'process-centric' sales teams outperform non-process-centric teams for every measurable metric.

Sales team performance and effectiveness has been shown to increase by as much as 40% when sales teams have a clear, proven sales process visible to them. The chances are extremely good that if you currently have 5 salespeople on your team, you most likely have 5 different sales processes going on all at once!

What other part of your business runs on multiple different processes? Imagine running your business with half a dozen different accounting processes, or multiple IT or customer service processes? Sounds silly doesn’t it? Yet sales teams do so all the time. Whilst you can reengineer your current selling process, (see the book Bulletproof Your Sales Team - The 5 Strategies Guaranteed to Turbo-Boost Your Sales Team’s Performance) the exercise is not for the faint-hearted.

It may be advisable that you bring in professional expertise to ensure the greatest success. You may just be too close to your own current sales methodology to see the gaps or dysfunction.

So there you have it - 3 practical ideas you can implement right now to get sales firing again. At the very least, run Strategy #1 for 90 days. If you will do that, sales will start to flow again.

There is no question that in these economically uncertain times, sales leaders will need to get a whole lot smarter and more shrewd if they are going to keep their existing customers and they are going to need to be a whole lot more crafty if they are to win the slim pickings that are still out there to be had!

That being said there are some fundamental sales management strategies that, when implemented, are guaranteed to generate sales within the next 90 days.

In the last blog we looked at Strategy #1 which was all about applying the principles of One-on-One Sales Performance Coaching as a powerful, time-tested, behaviour-changing, sales acceleration strategy. This time let’s go where the money is. Let’s focus on sales that are closest to the “bulls-eye!”

Strategy # 2

Look for sales closest to the “bulls-eye!”

Imagine standing front on and facing the circles of a target. Imagine the “bulls-eye!” in the middle is where the money is. The circle just out side the bulls-eye represents your existing customers, let call them A’s. They are the ones closest to the money. The next circle represents those customers that have bought from you occasionally, let call them B’s. The circle just beyond the B’s are your C’s and they represent those prospective companies you have targeted but have yet to buy from you. Then outside of your C’s we have the D’s. These are prospects we have yet to consider.

Once again, as simple as this practice may seem, it is often neglected. When we need more sales, where do we go looking? Out there in D, E, F, and G land.

Start looking for business closest to where the money is.

Your sales opportunity is to expand your influence within your A and B customer’s organizations and earn a higher percentage of their business. According to the 2008 CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Report only 33.6% of C.S.O’s interviewed were able to farm additional revenues from their existing customer base, and that was last year during a comparatively good market!

Your role as sales manager is to help your salespeople identify where you have previously left money on the table. What are the opportunities with your A, B and C companies? Go work there! Let your Marketing department figure out how to bring the D, E, F, and G prospects in to where the C’s, B’s and A’s reside.

If your salespeople can’t answer the questions in Strategy 1 with your A, B and C customers, you have work to do. Have your people renew old relationships. Have them beat the bushes for new opportunities you have yet to capture with your A, B and C customers. They live closest to where the money lives. Go get em’!