Implementing a Sales System. We recently conducted a survey of 100 SME companies and found that approximately 40% of these businesses either use Excel to track their sales opportunities, or have no system at all for tracking their sales opportunities. These are all established businesses that have had success in the past but have reached a point where they are battling to grow their businesses further.
Knowing that a consistent flow sales is the life-blood of a business, our advice to these businesses is to become more deliberate about their approach to sales. And an important step is to implement a system to track all their sales opportunities.
A consistent flow of sales opportunities has 3 important characteristics:
- A number of potential opportunities in the pipeline that is significantly higher than the number of actual sales required every month
- A number of opportunities in the pipeline spread across various stages of the sales cycle, including early stages, mid stages and late stages
- A plethora of activities being conducted throughout the day, every day, across every single opportunity in the pipeline.
When you multiply the number of opportunities needed in the pipeline by the number of activities needed per opportunity, it quickly multiplies up to more complexity that any individual can cope with or keep track of consistently.
Only a good quality sales system can help an individual manage all this complexity.
And although Excel is a wonderfully flexible tool, it very quickly becomes an unintelligible mess as it grows in number of columns and number of rows. This mess throws up barriers to consistent use of the tool, and very quickly data gets outdated and of no value.
So, when implementing a sales system, make sure it is good quality, that it is easy to use, fast to implement, and reasonably priced, as it becomes essential for any SME business in a scaling up phase of growth.
By Andrew Aitken: Business Coach at GROW
