You’re not a sales rep – you’re in management, so what do you know about sales, right?

For good or bad, gone are the days when management could ignore the selling process. The small business owner of today must have a selling strategy to successfully grow their business.

“But why do I need a sales strategy?” you ask, “Most of my business comes through personal references and that’s all the selling I need!”

It’s true that new customers who come through word of mouth can be great for business, but are they the type of client you really want? Are they the most profitable clients you could get? And is working with them going to lead you to bigger and better things? A clearly articulated sales strategy is one of the best ways to develop your business in the direction you want to go when it comes to getting the right sort of customer.

What makes a great sales strategy

Developing a great sales strategy isn’t really that hard and it will save you time and make you money in the long run. But there are a few building blocks that need to be put in place before you can march out the door with your pockets stuffed with business cards.

First, identify the market that’s right for your product – will you be offering a low cost product and going for high volume sales, or is your product a specialty or niche one that would appeal only to certain market segments? Then decide how you want to sell to your customers - cold calling, direct mail, e-marketing, or through a seminar for example.

You’ll need to organize the back end of your sales initiatives to take full advantage of the strategy you adopt – that is, develop a sales support system. A database of contacts that is continually updated is essential in many businesses, and where that’s the case, so is a sales tracking system so you know where particular customers, and potential customers, are in the sales cycle (this will also help with projecting revenue).

You might also find that the results, or conversion rates, achieved by some of your people are better than others - tracking conversion rates is an important part of any sales strategy. What you can measure, you can manage … and it’s great if you can have the people with the best conversion rate sharing their techniques with the rest.

If implementing a structured sales strategy sounds daunting given the work you are already doing, then talk to one of our team - we have a proven process for helping our clients implement a sales strategy. Happy selling!

Your website can be your most important marketing tool. You can use it to build relationships with new customers, manage relationships with existing ones, and launch new products and services to the market.

It used to be enough just to have a website for your business. But the days of the pure brochureware site – one that lists your services but doesn’t provide an opportunity to really connect with your customers – are gone.

Now, consumers expect websites to be interactive, informative and interesting. And it’s not all that hard to achieve. Below are ten steps to developing a website with real marketing punch.

Step 1 – Make sure your site is easy to navigate. Ensure it takes next to no time to upload, there are no ‘heavy’ graphics on the front page and even when you get beyond the homepage, information is easy to access.

Step 2 – Tricky graphics rarely convert into sales. Pop-up windows, clever animations and other fancy features distract potential customers from your key messages. They also annoy many people, which is probably not going to win you business.

Step 3 – Use plain English, not jargon, and clearly explain what you do on the homepage. If it’s not immediately clear what you do, potential customers are unlikely to delve further into the site to find out.

Step 4 – Update your content regularly. People use the Web to find information and if you position your site as a place consumers can find credible, up-to-date facts about your industry (not just your products and services) they are more likely to return.

Step 5 – Don’t change your navigation too frequently. People like to get used to the feel of a site and are more likely to return to sites with which they are already comfortable.

Step 6 – Optimize your site. Optimization is a process that helps to move your site nearer to the top of search engine lists. It works by ensuring that key words that match your product offering are stored in the site’s metatags (this is what Internet search engines use to sort sites). It also usually involves paying for your site to be registered on popular search engines and directories. For more information on optimization we’ve included another article in this issue, ‘You’ve Got To Google To Grow’.

Step 7 – Respond to email requests sent through to your site. Research suggests that as many as one in three companies fail to respond to emails sent through the contacts page – hardly a means of developing good customer relations.

Step 8 – Consider sending weekly, monthly or quarterly newsletters to back up your Web presence. But don’t spam – make sure the people receiving the newsletter actually want to receive it.

Step 9 – Back up your online marketing efforts with your offline tools. Put your website address on all stationery and print or broadcast advertising. Even include it on your voice mail message.

Step 10 – Involve professionals. Unless you’re a designer or a web developer, involve experts in the development of your website.

Follow these steps, and your site might become your highest earning sales person! If you don’t have a website yet and are concerned about how to develop one we can provide you with information on an affordable and easy to implement out of the box solution. Just give us a call.

So … you’ve invested the time developing and fine tuning your company’s website and everything is working well - links take users to the right places, your logo appears on every page and customers can now securely purchase your products online.

All you need now is sufficient traffic – or a constant stream of ‘hits’ to your site – to justify the investment you’ve made. In other words, you need to somehow make your online offering more accessible, or easier to find, than the thousands of other alternatives available.

Sure, you could use the more conventional media - print, TV and radio - to spread the word, but these days the most dynamic way must surely be the web itself because it acts as a directory with instant click through access to your business.

There are plenty of ways to do this of course, but the strategy being followed by a growing number of small businesses, worldwide, can be described in one word: Google!

For the uninitiated, Google is an Internet search engine (similar to Alta Vista and Yahoo), which has reached almost cult status because of its ability to weed out the rubbish and provide accurate, helpful search results.

Google assigns each page a value called a ‘page rank’, which is mainly based on the number of other sites that link to that page. This value means that sites that have more links to them are perceived as being higher in quality, and therefore receive a higher page rank. The sites most likely to be useful then display first - thus saving the user time.

The best use of Google to your business is ensuring that your website appears as high as possible in its search results. This isn’t as difficult as it may sound. The first step is to add your website to the Google database, which means that it will be indexed every month by Google and appear in its search results pages.

Then arrange with your suppliers and other contacts who have web sites to link to your site, and get your business listed in relevant online directories. These steps will lead to higher listings in search results, but you should also have your site optimized by a web designer so that Google can easily find the relevant information on your site.

Alternatively, Google also offers a service to small businesses known as ‘AdWords’, which allows you to display advertisements for specific search terms at the side of the engine’s regular search results.

The best part of this is that you only pay when a user clicks on your advertisement. You can also control which search terms it is displayed for, nominate how much you are willing to pay for each click, as well as set a daily budget to spend on clicks.

Google's AdWords program could be a great option for your small business if you want to promote new products or services. The benefit is that it allows your site to be seen high on the search results pages, even though you may have not yet achieved a high page rank.

Many small business owners feel much more confident advertising via the cost-per-click method than placing an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, because they are only paying for people actually visiting their site.

It is becoming an imperative that small businesses can be found by a search engine such as Google. Some experts even say that in two years it will be more important to be found in Google than being found in the Yellow Pages.

Given a tough economic climate many small business owners are happy just making a profit – any profit. Satisfied that money is coming through the door, it’s all too easy to be lulled into a false sense of security that, once profitable, the business will just keep making money.

This can be a big mistake. It’s not enough to merely make a profit – you must manage your business so that it remains profitable. This can take a little time and forward planning – but without this process, you could jeopardize the stability of your business in the future.

Analyzing your profit base allows you to see which parts of your business are contributing to the bottom line and which are not.

It also helps you to decide which lines of business are likely to deliver profits in the future and, ipso facto, which areas of the business warrant further investment. But before you can start analyzing profits, you need to look at likely future sales, as well as your ongoing budget.

Getting started

The first step in the profit analysis process is working out your sales projections. This starts by ensuring you have the right record keeping systems in place so that you can easily see which areas of your business deliver the strongest sales.

Make sure you keep immaculate invoicing records – it’s also a good idea to keep a sales journal, a book that records all sales on either a daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on the nature of your business.

When you know which areas of your business deliver the strongest sales, you can start working out future sales projections.

If you have new products or services for which it’s tricky to work out future sales it’s worth playing with multiple sales scenarios around low, average and strong sales. This ensures you’re prepared if the product’s sales fall below expectations.

Once sales projections are in place you can begin preparing your budget. Remember to align expenses with likely sales - and don’t take expense figures at face value - see where you can reduce costs and cut out expenses that don’t directly contribute to profitability.

It’s also a good idea to benchmark your expenses against those of your competitors’. Your industry association should be able to provide you with market data about how much money other companies in your industry spend on standard budget items such as marketing, rent and team members.

Leveraging profit information

Sales projections and budgets are in place – now it’s time to start playing with profits. Work out the profit margin for each of your business lines and think about investing in those that have the highest margins or the most potential for growth.

Also consider getting out of products and services that are not adding real value to your company.

Finally, keep in mind that cash is king. It’s very important to understand (and plan for) timing differences between cash and profit flows – they’re not the same thing. Your business can be showing a profit but be short on cash from time to time, and its cash that keeps the business viable because you need to be able to keep up your payments on stock, wages and so on. To keep control over this critical aspect of your business you really need a regular cash flow forecast. We’d be happy to advise on this. We also provide a service called Targeting Business Results that will help you analyze your profits and get you on the right track for maintaining profitability.

Risk management isn’t just a buzz word, nor is it something only big businesses need. Risk management should be part of every organization’s ongoing business planning process.

Why? Because businesses are now exposed to many more risks than in the past in the form of legal risk, technology risk and economic risk, to name but a few. Understanding the potential impact these perils have on your business is a necessity in today’s business environment.

What do we mean by ‘risk’ here? Risk is the chance that an action or event will adversely impact your business. Risk management is a systematic process you put in place to help minimize the consequences of any adverse event. It’s a way of identifying, analyzing, monitoring and managing activities or occurrences that have the potential to damage your operations.

It’s important to develop a concrete risk management process as part of your business’s day-to-day operations. This usually starts with your business plan. Most business plans contain a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.

This identifies risk and is the first step in any risk management framework. Once you have identified your risk you can develop a risk profile, which outlines potential risks to which your business is exposed. Businesses can’t completely eliminate risk – for example, it’s impossible to completely avoid IT risk. But what you can do is work out which risks you are prepared to expose your business to, and what you can do if these dangers become reality.

This is why managers need to work out the risk tolerance zone or the extent to which the business is prepared to be exposed to danger.

When you know your potential risks, you can start developing risk minimization strategies. This might involve things like ensuring you have strong firewalls in place to reduce the chance of your computers being exposed to viruses and hackers.

It might also include ensuring you have the right insurance cover if, for example, your business was destroyed by fire. A written action plan including a timetable of activities that will help reduce risk is usually part of a risk minimization strategy.

Developing a culture that encourages team members to report potential business risks also goes a long way in helping to reduce risk.

Make sure you nominate someone to be the champion of the risk management process and encourage other team members to go to this person if they believe the company is at risk in any way. Also put in place clear reporting frameworks so that your risk management system is clearly documented.

Bogged down in the day-to-day, it’s easy for small business owners to ignore risk management. But this is a false economy.

In reality, most businesses can’t afford NOT to have a risk management strategy. For advice on assessing your real risk areas and your exposure to damage and loss of earnings if things go wrong, ask about our risk assessment and prevention services.

“Don't tell me that worry doesn't do any good. I know better. The things I worry about don't happen.”

- Anonymous