5 PRACTICAL STEPS TO GROW YOUR SALES

Are you making your sales effective?

Download our 5 practical steps to making the most of the sales resources in your business.

Let us help you with your sales growth and product development strategies.

Are you aware of the simple changes that will help power your sales?

Improve Your Bottom Line

Are you satisfied with your profits?

Would you like to lower your cost of sales?

Are your operating costs under control?

Incite will complete a full analysis of your existing costs and implement proven practices that ensure an improved bottom line.

Marketing That works

Would you like to see a better return from your marketing spend?

Is your marketing message clearly communicated to your potential customers?

Incite will draw upon its marketing experience to help design and implement communication strategies that deliver a tangible return on marketing investment.

Funding Your Business Growth

Is a lack of cash constraining your business growth?

When it comes to funding your growth, do you know which option is best for you and your business?

Have you reached a wall in your progress?

Incite will assist you to identify and implement the right funding options.

Outperform Your Competition

Are competitors taking your customers?

Do you know what makes your business unique in the market? Are you looking to change your services to grow sales?

We will assist you to develop the most effective strategy to outperform your competition.

Export Your Products Overseas

What is the best export method to enter a foreign market to ensure sales success?

Do you know how much it will cost to sell overseas?

Using Incite's vast network of international contacts and experience Incite will enable your business to sell successfully in the international market place.

Profitable Exit Solutions

What is the end game for you, and your business?

Are you looking to sell/exit your business in the next 5 years?

Leaving your business is never easy, but it should be financially and emotionally rewarding. Incite will work with you to determine and most lucrative way to exit your business.

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Stay Relevant by "Getting to Know" your Customer

Downturn or not, the growth of any business relies on how well you know your customer and what you do with that information. As the owner/CEO of a business, you have the responsibility to ensure your customers understand what your business offers, and to do that you must understand what it is your customers NEED – and anticipate that their needs change regularly.

Speaking to our clients recently, many are reviewing the ‘value’ they derive from current suppliers. More than ever, to ensure you don’t lose business as a result of a cost cutting exercise, you need to proactively manage existing customer relationships, review how well you are servicing the customer needs and reinforce the value you provide to counteract any competitive activity. You must ensure that your customers do not see your product or service as a commodity.

Who has the responsibility?

Are you clear on who has responsibility for identifying ‘customer needs’ in your organisation? And do they know it is their responsibility?

Customer management is often shared between the sales and marketing teams. Each of these functions play a necessary role in understanding and meeting customer needs – but often the delivery of this becomes no more than ensuring that you’ve sold everything you possibly can to your customer base. Up-selling and cross-selling falls short about what we are talking about here - really “knowing your customer”. Knowing your customer enables your business to:

refine the product strategy driving the products or service range you offer
reinforce the marketing and sales messages you promote
know whether to respond to competitor activity.

Ask your management team for a read of your customer base and gauge whether they are taking the necessary time to understand what is motivating and driving your customers currently. Ultimately, accountability for the customer sits with the business owner/CEO – if you are not placing an emphasis on customer needs you can’t assume your employees are either.

Start with your existing customer base.

What would be the impact to your revenue if your number one customer left tomorrow?

Simply analyzing and categorising your customers by the current ‘potential’ revenue and margin they can generate will help you develop a picture of which customers are the most important customer type for your business.

Once you identify the customer type with the highest contribution you can then get on with the business of getting to know them intimately –not just what you’re selling them but to really understand what motivates them to buy your product or service and most importantly of all –how valuable/important your product or service is to their business – this is the inherent ‘value’ you provide them.

Now get ‘intimate’ with your customers and prospects

Once you have unlocked this ‘value’ its time to get intimate:

1. What opportunities do I have to ‘enhance’ this ‘value?
2. Does this enable me to charge more?
3. How many customers are ‘conscious’ that this is the value proposition we offer?
4. How many ‘ideal’ customers are there in my market place?
5. How can you reach them?
6. What are the trends in that industry – how will that industry change in the next 12mths-5 years and what impact will that have on the value perception of my product?

This is not an exercise that is completed once every 3 year Planning Cycle. This is a ‘process’ that needs to be ‘embedded’ into your organisation and ‘owned’ by the CEO.

So how do you do it?

Here are some easy to implement options that the Incite team recommends:

1. Keep in touch. Visit your key customer regularly with the specific objective of understanding the drivers of their business. Get to ‘understand’ what your product or service does for them. And don’t just ask the senior management – ask frontline operational staff that have to you use your product or service.

2. Find your value driver: If you believe you are selling a ‘commodity’ item you need to change that attitude. Find out what your clients like about your delivery –customer service –how easy they find you to deal with and see if that gives you something to work with.

3. Keep up to date: Ensure that your organisation has access to the general industry information within which your clients operate.

4. Put processes in place to support you: CEO involvement can be supported by a range of automated or regular feedback mechanisms including:

Conduct regular feedback surveys - in person or via your website and provide incentives for your customers to participate. Ideally, these should be completed every 6 months at least but rotate the customers you ask.
Conduct ad-hoc focus groups to review the pros and cons of a particular product or service.
Develop a Customer Board – hold a regular meeting with those customers with whom you have a solid partnership with and who are prepared to give you feedback warts and all.

5. Build profile: Now is no time to hide your light under a bushel. Get out there and be seen to be ‘experts’ in your field. This type of activity goes a long way to reinforce why a customer values your product or service.

Why do some owners and CEO’s find talking to clients so hard to do?

It is easy to lose sight of the customer while you are busy dealing with the internal machinations of running a business.. watching the cash-flow and managing operations while staff are all screaming for attention. We see lots of businesses that have lost their way having spent an enormous amount of management time refining their product/service or delivery mechanism but they’ve lost sight of their customer’s interests. In the most extreme cases we see the best-oiled engines that have nowhere to go as their customers have moved on while they were getting their house in order!

Remember it can be 5-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. So ensure you stay relevant by taking the time to get to know your customers and not losing touch once you do.

Refer to the accompanying case study on Netcare, a Sydney based IT company, for an example of how a ‘determined’ business has been able to identify the distinctive capability that their clients valued.

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