Knowledge Management
Many companies do not utilize their employees to their full potential. One great way to harness their abilities is by mobilizing them through small sales-focused groups. This can serve as an extra source of income, inexpensively market your business through the people who know it best, and ensure you are selling the right products at the right places to the right types of customers. Every employee should work within a team where their skills compliment other member’s abilities, and all personal networks should be sifted for additional partnership and sales opportunities. There are dozens of specific areas that individuals or groups of employees can focus on improving sales including:
- Formal Client Qualifications
- Potential Client Identification and Due Diligence
- First Contact Meetings, Cold Calls, and Networking
- Sales and Contract Material Creation
- Internal Knowledge Assessment and Best Practices Analysis of competitor sales initiatives
Once this is complete, work on creating an explicit sales tracking system that rolls up individual efforts into group and department-based performance tracking. This should tie together your long-term sales goals with each week’s new potential client contacts, calendar additions, new customers, current targets, and items to tackle over the following week. The knowledge management system can executed be within a sales program or a simple Excel spreadsheet, and should focus on action items and results. Usually these materials will be most effective while visible to everyone on the sales team. Team and individual compensation should be structured to entice employees to work on the area where their natural strengths will be best utilized.
Explicitly developing strategic sales plans, no matter how dynamic the environment, is invaluable to a company seeking extraordinary growth. Without a plan, you will drift from client to client, relying on luck to keep your company moving forward and your resources fully utilized. If you do not have any competition, you have your head in the sand, and you need to redefine your market. If you do not have enough customers, ask yourself, what new niches could we carve out of the market with our current resources? What are the most profitable competitors in the market doing?