With the New Year now well underway, many people will have resolved to improve their personal lives, promising to give up smoking, join the gym or embark on a new career.
New Year’s resolutions should not only be restricted to our personal lives, however, as many businesses could also benefit greatly from taking stock of the previous year’s performance and setting goals for the 12 months ahead.
If sales figures weren’t as high as expected in 2007, turnover targets weren’t met or contract numbers did not reach the required level, now may be the time to ensure a successful period of growth for your business by setting some achievable sales targets for 2008.
And the good news is that putting plans in place to turn your top line into your bottom line needn’t be a complex process.
Indeed, there are ten simple steps a company can take early in the year to ensure its sales goals for 2008 are not only met, but exceeded:
1. Customer Relationships: Top of the list for achieving your company’s goals is to always keep your customers in mind. Strengthening your relationships with your clients and developing feelings of loyalty will help to ensure they do not turn to a competitor. To do this you must communicate with them regularly, whilst also being proactive in identifying and resolving any issues.
2. Your Team: If you don’t have the right team behind you the company will not realise its full potential. Your team should be motivated, well-trained and driven. They should have a clear idea of the company’s key messages, and the products and services it offers, while supporting marketing activities and initiatives such as promotional offers and advertising campaigns.
3. Market Knowledge: Having a broad market knowledge goes much further than just recognising your competitors and monitoring what they are doing and saying. You should aim to know where the highest market potential lies and where you can compete effectively. This includes taking time to build profiles of both existing and potential customers and competitors.
4. Differentiation: Before you can move forward and grow your business, you must have an understanding of what differentiates you from the competition. If the answer is nothing then you need to find a differentiator – something that customers need and value and aren’t getting from competitors.
5. Marketing Campaigns: No matter what the size or specialty, every company needs to create a focused and well targeted marketing campaign. This ensures you are communicating your features and benefits to their maximum potential by using a wide array of marketing tactics, for example, direct marketing, PR, advertising, sponsorship and the use of web-based marketing, producing an increase in market awareness and resulting in improved sales success.
6. Tools: Once you are confident that you have a strategic campaign in place you must ensure you have the relevant tools to support your sales effort – for example account management, call logging or opportunity evaluation tools.
7. Existing Customers: Many managers believe that ‘the job is done’ once you have secured the customer, this is not the case. To maximise the potential of the account you must ask whether they could be increasing their level of involvement with you or taking advantage of other services you offer.
8. New Business: One of the key aims of growing a business and achieving your sales targets is identifying new prospects. By using your team’s market knowledge you can direct your efforts to the most relevant industry sectors, based on current demand and potential growth. You then need to formulate a strategy to target these potential new clients.
9. Product and Service Development: Could there be any changes made to your products/services to ensure they fully meet the needs of the market and are offering something different to the competition? As a business you should always be searching for a competitive edge, ultimately adding value to your offering.
10. Planning: Budgets, forecasts and targets. Set challenging but achievable targets. Make sure you track performance using forecasting tools and ensure remedial action is taken to address any shortfall.
Sales Evolution specialises in helping ambitious organisations achieve remarkable and sustainable sales revenue growth. The company works with a wide range of companies throughout a variety of industry sectors, including oil and gas, marine, IT, engineering and professional services.
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