This is going to be a very short chapter indeed.

It’s one born out of failure and the subsequent wisdom that that experience gave me the opportunity to learn but it still amazes, frustrates and leaves me down right angry that very few companies do any of them.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the companies that don’t do this are only the one man bands but it’s actually a problem that runs through every company and I can tell you why.

Just because someone works in sales doesn’t mean they know how to sell. If you’ve worked in a huge company that gives you pre-sold leads, you can hit a huge target and sure you’ll look great on paper but take that person and plop them into a start-up and they will fail simply because they weren’t raised in famine like I was.

Trust me, these are the things you need to do to improve your sales, and you need to be religious about them:

1. Get your response times down – The number one fact that will help you to sell more is to respond to the need of your leads super-fast. That’s why the internet works so well for sales, because the answers are there at someone’s finger tips at the exact point they want them. If you make someone wait for an answer there is the opportunity for that lead to go cold and for them to go elsewhere, so you have to treat leads like food fresh from the oven, it’s meant to be eaten hot.

2. Understand when someone is ready to buy and when they want you to follow up – if someone wants something right now then get the sale done there and then, don’t give them the time to think it over. But if they aren’t ready yet then give them the time to think about it but always agree a catch up date. Not following up is one of my biggest pet hates. You can’t spend time and money generating leads if you’re not going to follow up!

3. Stop being a shotgun with your marketing budget – Leads do not matter if they aren’t relevant. It’s better to spend money on a few leads that will convert than to get lots of leads that might. Highly converting leads are always expensive, so you’ll need to make sure that you factor in your cost of sale to the job too. You might want to charge £50, but if your lead costs you £10 your price should really be £60. Stop listening to the newspaper guy that wants you to spend money for no traceable effect and spend money on things that you can prove make you money like adwords.

4. Look 80% credible not 100% – that does not mean you need to spend millions on a website, it means that you need to look like you say you can. That includes having testimonials and good news articles online when people research you. You’re blog needs to be up to date and you need to have an email address that’s actually for your company!

5. Get your reporting right – data handling is absolutely key to making a sale. You might not think it, but it comes hand in hand with the speed of your response. If you can’t work out where people are in your sales funnel or how to move them to the next stage then your sales are dead. If you hit a lean patch too it can often be data handling that’s creating it because you have so much information it’s hard to see where your focus needs to be. Good reporting doesn’t have to be long or complex, you just need to answer a few questions; what did I spend, where did I spend it, what leads did it generate and how many became sales. If your reporting can’t answer those few questions then stop spending money on them, and if they can then soon enough you’ll know where to put all of your money.

Chapter Summary:

• Read above!

Read our next blog post “Understanding paradigms”.