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Sell More Effectively:
The WAY your company sells will determine
your revenue
National Association of Industrial Destruction Quarterly Journal, December 1, 2005
by Pete Kadens, CEO Acquirent LLC
In business today, people often confuse marketing
with sales, lead generation with business
development, and strategy with execution.
Unfortunately, there is a significant shortage
of people in our market today who solely execute.
This lack of “executors” is important
because revenue generally comes from successfully
executed plans.
In the lower to middle markets, companies
spend considerable funds on sales consultants
who more often than not develop strategies
that create a serious disconnect in the sales
process because strategy is only as good as
the people who are prepared to implement it.
In the late 90’s these same companies
often believed that the sales process could
be streamlined and disintermediated by eliminating
the salesperson and selling via another source,
such as the internet. However, in the past
few years it’s become clear that high-level
sales are built on trust, a trust that you
cannot obtain via the internet, but rather
only by looking someone in the eye. Hence,
it is becoming increasingly important in sales
to leverage the skills of a sales person who
can execute.
Execution is clearly a multi-tiered process
that varies depending on
the underlying product or service that the
salesperson is selling. However, there are
a few constants that exist in sales execution
that should be engrained in the minds of your
salespeople. First, is the theory of “tactful
persistence.” The best salespeople are
professional at every level and every stage
of the sales process, but also have the ability
to constantly be in contact with their prospects
without becoming the stereotypical, annoying
salesperson who prospects constantly avoid.
Second, the greatest misconception in sales
is that a salesperson can close a deal by
making the cold call and then going immediately
for the close. Somewhere along the line the
salesperson probably forgot about the art
of the follow up. Unless your company sells
a point of purchase product through a retail
or internet channel, the follow up strategy
is crucial in order to keep business in the
pipeline and ensure that your prospects will
one day become your clients. Third and probably
most important, is that your salespeople maintain
both “focus” and “momentum”.
Sales can be a roller coaster ride, but the
best salespeople execute through a reliable
and repeatable process that creates “focus”
and “momentum” in perpetuity.
When thinking about execution, it may be worthwhile
to consider
outsourcing your sales execution to an outside
firm. In any business there is an internal
metric that assesses the cost of actually
bringing in business, which is often called
the “cost of client acquisition.”
It has been proven that lower to middle market
companies can significantly lower their “cost
of client acquisition” by using an outside
firm to provide sales execution services.
There are high-fixed costs associated with
building an in-house sales team, or even with
hiring one or two salespeople in house, and
sales people are transient and often times
unreliable. The way to guard against these
potential pitfalls as a business owner is
to have an outside firm manage and build your
sales execution team, and then they bear the
risk of hiring, training, and managing your
salespeople.
Pete Kadens is the founder and CEO of Acquirent,
a Chicago-based
outsourced sales execution team (pkadens@acquirent.com)
Acquirent is one of the premier outsourced
sales companies in the world and has experience
in the records management and destruction
business. Check out Acquirent at www.acquirent.com.
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