I’ve doubled my sales three years in a row, but before I started to find success I wasted my time on cold calls and drop-ins. This year my sales are down a bit and I know exactly why: I’ve been spending an inordinate my time on marketing. The good thing about having a system to maintain a healthy sales pipeline is you can easily jump back into it… and that’s exactly where my focus currently lies.
For the past eight months I’ve spent long nights and many of my working hours on a podcast I created with a good friend called “WhatUp Silicon Valley” as a marketing tool. The purpose of the podcast is lead generation and it has proven to be profitable from a dollar and cents point of view. However, when I factor in my time the pod has room to grow to truly deliver some ROI. After realizing these marketing efforts weren’t profitable at the current rate, I’ve made a shift in my weekly activities to make sure I’m no longer neglecting my sales tactics.
Below are three quick steps that I have taken in the past couple months to get my sales back on track and I'm now at a pace to be above where I finished December of 2016.
1) “Think and Grow Rich”
This book is everything to me! The teachings in “Think and Grow Rich” are what fuels my fire for success. I highly recommend reading this book, applying the teachings and revisiting what you learn every year. Every November for the past five years I have gone through an exercise I created based on the book’s teachings. In a nutshell, I design a poster that clearly states what my goal(s) are, what I am willing to give up, my “stats” and a power statement to read once daily. I use this image and hang it near my bed, and from time to time use it as a wallpaper on my phone. One of the biggest lessons of “Think and Grow Rich” is simply to believe in yourself and have a positive outlook with the understanding that if you put in the work, you will find success. This simple mindset is beyond powerful and all I needed to do to get back on track was revisit this exercise.
2) Work your current clients first.
I thought I had this really clever idea that involved reaching out to 20 people on LinkedIn per week who seemed to match my ideal buyer persona. I developed initial messages along with a couple different responses that I’d have at my disposal. While I found success in getting conversations started, I didn’t experience enough success to really justify the time I was putting into this system. So, I called an audible. Or as Bobby Lehew from commonsku once so eloquently put it, I went back to my natural state of “permanent beta.” See, I’m constantly trying new things and tweaking what works or abandoning something that doesn’t work.
Here’s what I did instead: I took a similar approach but with my actual clients – and by that I mean everyone who has bought from us in the past two years. It was as simple as exporting the data from commonsku and loading that into a Google Sheet. From there I developed a monthly canned message to send out to these people and asked my VA to go into my email and send them out personally, one by one. As a side note, I find this approach of going into your sent mail, deleting the “FW” in the subject and sending that same email to the next person down your list much more efficient (in terms of a response rate) than simply doing an eblast. This campaign has been extremely effective in uncovering new opportunities with old clients.
3) Opportunity ReportsWe use commonsku at ValueBP, and my favorite report is an “opportunity report.” My sales are always the highest when I run opportunity reports every Monday morning. Any request that comes into our office gets logged as an opportunity. Even if it’s as simple as, “Hey Sam, do you have any new products I should know about?” Basically, my rule of thumb is anything at all we can turn into an opportunity we will. I think a lot of companies overlook this, but I could be wrong. To me, anything at all that could potentially turn into a project I want to log in commonsku so that when I run my weekly opportunity reports it’s now on my radar and I can now check-in with this client to convert it to a closed project. Follow-up, responses in a speedy manner, and demonstrating that you are thinking ahead goes along way in winning new clients and converting opportunities to money in the bank.
Bottom line is that the clients are out there and they want to work with good people. Show them, through your actions, that you are proactive and have a keen sense for attention to detail and you’ll earn their trust time after time.
Happy Selling!
Sam Kabert is the creative director of ValueBP Marketing Group and the creator and co-host of the podcast “WhatUp Silicon Valley!” A risk taker who embraces permanent beta, Sam is leading the transformation of his family-run office supplies business into a promotional products powerhouse. Sam can be reached at Sam@ValueBP.com.