Going Out for Business
How your most important business skill goes from good to great
Businesses are making cuts because economic conditions are tough. But cutting costs alone does not lead to growth.
Whether you’re a CEO, entrepreneur or a freelancer, the best strategy to ensure you’ll continue making progress — even against stiff headwinds — is by focusing on the things you can control.
I’m working with more clients than ever on sales, marketing, and revenue-generating operations. These skills are always important, but they’re essential during a downturn. Even if you’re a cog in a giant corporate wheel, be assured that your management is looking for a greater sense of urgency around revenue growth in .
👉 I provide sales coaching to help individuals, small- and medium-sized businesses optimize their revenue generation. If you’d like to have the PDF that describes how this works, just hit reply and ask.
Today, I’ll share some thoughts from this practice.
What are Sales Skills?
“Sales” — yuck. The term evokes things we all hate: Buying a car, or answering the door to an unexpected and unwelcome solicitor. It’s hard to see ourselves as someone who is good at sales but still the kind of person we want to be.
Here’s good news: The skills that made a salesperson great in the 1980s are not relevant in the modern world. If you always never wanted to be that kind of salesperson, or have that kind of business, you are alive at the right time. Finally!
A better term is “revenue operations” or “RevOps”. I love this term for all the work inside a company that relates to revenue generation. Its important because it acknowledges that most of the important sales work happens inside — and that has changed tremendously in the last 20 years.
For most companies, the most important work on sales is in preparation, research, planning, measurement, strategy, and so on.
Even for a freelancer, thinking about RevOps can change how you approach your business. In a bigger company, being mindful of RevOps will help you align your mindset with senior management and investors.
Understanding RevOps and how it impacts your business is an incredibly crucial business skill, whether you are a freelancer, entrepreneur, account manager, or SAAS sales rep.
Science, riches
Your mental model of sales may be based on a caricature of a golden-throated Don Draper pitchman in a snazzy outfit, a loud voice, and whiz-bang demo or deck. Many of the archetypes for a successful sales performance are toxically masculine. Also I cannot find any evidence that they actually work. Cool!
I have also discovered this: good products made by good people sell themselves even when sold by salespeople who are objectively terrible at their job. Have you ever bought something from an objectively terrible salesperson? See, told you.
Thanks to the internet, it’s harder to sell a bad product at any price — even with the salesperson of the year — because there’s a better product with a worse salesperson just a click away.
So, what does work? Experimentation, trial and error, and measurement, repeated and practiced with discipline. This is a longer topic for a lecture or a workshop. I learned this from working for more than a decade at the biggest companies in the world — so you don’t have to. And I’ve read all the books on the subject at the airport bookstore.
The experts all agree.
“Hustle” is not a Strategy
In the academic world, the process I described above is called “science.” The knowledge gained from it over time is called “truth.”
Science allows us to determine what works, and what does not. It is, apparently, the only way of doing that. That right there is a pretty good argument for making it the basis of our approach to making money.
In many companies, scientific practices are rigorously applied in the product management, engineering, finance, and research departments. I have noticed it may be less often practiced on the sales team, which may rely on pressure tactics, pricing obfuscations, psychological stress, caffeine, and adrenaline.
It doesn’t take a radical reboot to alter that approach. It can be done the same way the coach improves the performance of any team, by working with the players, sharing experiences, drawing up plans, and calling the right plays.
That’s the one-word principle behind my sales coaching: Science.
When my clients apply a scientific approach it’s usually easy to find ways to make gains.
Here are three simple and concrete ways to combine measurement, trial and error, and repetition that can be applied to improve the revenue operations of almost any business.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”
Measurement and Attribution: Most people have heard this famous quote and it, like most, is total bullshit. The companies you are paying for your website and for your internet advertising want you to believe it! Well-run companies carefully scrutinize the return on investment of every dollar they spend on sales and marketing. Poorly-run companies do not. Even when it cannot be done with complete perfection, spending money with no attempt to measure the ROI is the very definition of superstition.
84% of deals are won by the first vendor that a buyer contacts
Speed to Lead: There’s plenty of research that shows how important it is to quickly connect with a potential client. You do not need to read it, though. When you need a plumber or electrician, do you hire the one with the best website, or the one that calls back first? Still, when I ask clients how long it takes them to respond to a potential client in the inbox, I rarely get a numeric answer! Aim to respond to prospects in minutes, not days. In larger companies, here’s a tip from experience that works: Sometimes just announcing that you’ll measure a number like this is enough to make it go down.
It’s easiest, fastest, and cheapest to sell more to the clients you already have.
Next best, to sell to prior, lapsed clients.
It’s hardest, slowest, and most expensive to win new clientsRevenue Sources: Most companies focus their business development efforts on finding new clients. For many, that’s where revenue growth has come from in the past. However, most companies will experience a stage where most growth will come from selling more to the clients they already have. You may choose to consider this approach when the economy looks a bit stormy. In any event, review on a quarterly basis whether you have sold as much as you can to every client who’s received an invoice. Send a pitch every year to a client who hasn’t received one recently.
Many of my other favorite tactics for revenue operations come from streamlining the sales process from quote to order: creating estimates, sending proposals, generating invoicing, optimizing collections, streamlining delivery, and so on.
If you’d like to hear more about sales coaching, just hit reply and ask for my PDF. It is suitable for you to forward around your organization.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you!