Unlocking Profit Potential: Keys to a Successful Sales System
Many Kitchen & Bath Businesses have experienced incredible growth in the past few years. During this growth, poor systems, especially sales systems, meant that each new client brought more stress and revealed more issues with the existing way of doing things. The people-power required to keep it all running smoothly increased, sometimes exponentially, and the easiest way to fix issues of stress and burnout was to hire more people.
While hiring to add capacity can work short-term, the long-term consequences of more people with poor systems is less efficiency and ultimately less profit. If your bottom line took a hit while your business was booming, then it might be time to shift your efforts to improving your systems before you put more people on the payroll.
Optimizing Workflows: Empowering Teams Through Effective Sales Systems
Good systems, especially sales systems, support the people doing the work. They simplify delivering expected results consistently. People can focus on building relationships, creating innovative designs, and guiding the client experience. This is possible if they’re not bogged down by chasing information, dealing with miscommunications, or redoing work due to outdated updates. Good systems can require fewer people to produce better outcomes. Plus, people experience less stress and perform work that utilizes their specific expertise and talents.
This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky aspiration for the distant future. You can begin improving your sales system today. Sure, you won’t achieve that extra 4% profit next week. However, with continuous improvement, you might see profit increase and stress decrease in a month or two. Implementing pieces like Key Performance Indicators will help you keep improving your sales system. They allow you to make adjustments as your business and its environment evolve.
Initiating Improvement: Defining and Enhancing Your Sales System
How to get started with improving your sales system? Well, that is what this whole season is about. So maybe the very first step is to be able to define your sales system so that you can evaluate it and then decide what you want to improve.
To define your sales system, you first need to be able to identify what your sales process is. You might already have this documented (high five!), but if not – all good. If your sales process isn’t yet documented, take 5 minutes and simply write down the steps between someone expressing interest in your services (that is, they call, email, submit an online form, etc.) and when they give you money.
Efficiency Unveiled: Evaluating and Enhancing Your Sales System Workflow
Once you examine the steps in your sales process, note where each piece of information is stored, created, and accessed. In a robust sales system, information for every step is stored, created, and accessed in a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) like Hubspot or Pipedrive. A less sophisticated system might involve writing the initial client name and phone number on a Post-it note, which is given to the designer. When the designer calls back, they collect an email address and store it in their Outlook contacts. When ready to propose the design, they email the client information to the accounting person, who enters it into Quickbooks to generate a proposal.
Systems are neither right nor wrong. The evaluation of a system is about if it is supporting the results you want now and in the future. Hopefully it is fairly obvious that the second system in our example is a lot less scalable than the first. It also is a lot less trackable and much more time consuming, making it harder for designers to take vacations and for owners to predict revenue and installer resources based on what is in the sales pipeline.
Strategic Assessment: Maximizing Your Sales System’s Potential
Taking the time to define your current sales system allows you to objectively evaluate its effectiveness. You can also identify the areas you want to prioritize for improvement. Completing this step increases the value you’ll get from upcoming episodes. In them, we’ll discuss sales system components in-depth and cover actions to improve specific parts.
In the next episode, you’ll learn about signs that your sales system might be underperforming. There’s no judgment here. If you continue using something that drains your energy daily, we all make choices. I’m just here to help you identify areas for improvement and show you alternative methods.
High-er Help: A Guide to Unlocking Business Potential Through Expertise
Heads up – High-er Help, my book on how to use experts to shortcut improvement, growth & capacity is launching October 23! Be the first to get the details on High-er Help and pre-order by going to higherhelpbook.com.
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