Sales Are Vital For Growth

Business Insight
29/07/2016

As you start out on your business journey, you may have no long term view, but just a desire to bring your product or service to market and see if it sells.

If it does, and you start to build a regular customer base and see some a modest return for your efforts it may be time to think about making a plan for growing your business.

In the early stages of your business, you'll likely see a very lean profit margin (or no profit at all), so any money you do make should go directly toward helping you grow.

A business’s ability to invest in itself helps accelerate growth, in those early years, it's critical to make sure that you're redirecting any revenues back into the company. It's vital to invest early and heavily in order to grow quickly."

While it is important not to lose sight of profitability, growth requires increased sales. Sales are key to a company’s performance, and not focussing on sales will result in your business not achieving its potential.

Siimon Reynolds, writing in Forbes magazine advocates that new businesses should be spending at least 80% of their day on sales, and more established businesses should be spending at least 30% of the day on the sales process or connecting with customers.

He says, “When you spend most of your time selling, opportunities quickly arise. Doors open. Cheques get written. Good things happen. When you stay in your office talking to your staff, pontificating over product details, admin and minutiae you may progress your business, but you won’t greatly increase your revenue.”

This is a point well made, it is just too easy to get bogged down in day to day administration, choosing furniture for your new office, worrying about which vehicles would be most suitable, and lose sight of your business’s core function - sales. Getting your goods to the marketplace and earning profit.

Nothing is more important for the success of your business, a shiny new office may be lovely and project a great image, but how will it be paid for?

Only going out there and asking more people to buy your stuff will make a real difference in the long run. All else is tinkering at the peripheries of success. All great companies are great at sales; they grow huge not just because of the quality of their product line (the world is filled with companies with great products that are struggling to survive) but their utter commitment to selling it better than their competitors, simply getting out there and asking people for their business.

Sales should be the absolute centre of what your company does, every single day. As the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson once remarked, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”

So look into ways you can increase your sales, to both existing customers and new, businesses neglect their existing customers at their peril. Good service, good products delivered on time and a follow up call will build customer loyalty and ensure repeat sales, after all, these folk are already in the market for your product or service, so it makes sense to build on your core. Feedback from your existing customers will also help to refine and develop your offering.

This focus on your established market is especially important if you're trying to get funding because lenders like to see a proven and consistent demand for your offering.

When thinking about growing your company, do you have the people in place to help you achieve your business goals? They need to be people who aren't afraid to roll up their sleeves, and for whom the words 'That's not my job,' don’t exist.

Siimon Reynolds suggests sitting down and working out what the average amount of time is that your people are spending each week either directly selling or on improving the sales process. Then set a goal to triple it, starting next week.

Don’t put up with any resistance from your sales staff about being pushed and held accountable either. It has been rightly said that the only time a sales person is working is when they are eye-to-eye and knee-to-knee with their customer. Any sales person who objects to close monitoring should be fired.

Sales are too important not to have a constant magnifying glass on it.

As Arnold Glasow the American businessman and humourist, famously said, “Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion; you must set yourself on fire.”