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 and make it simple to deliver the expected results consistently. People-power can be used for building relationships, creating innovative designs and guiding the client experience if it isn’t being sucked-dry by chasing down information, spinning out on miscommunications or re-doing work because the latest updates weren’t in the right place. Not only can good systems require less people to produce better outcomes, but the people are less stressed and better able to do the work that requires their specific expertise and talents.
This isn’t any pie-in-the-sky, maybe-someday aspiration. You can improve your sales system starting today. And sure, you aren’t going to get that additional 4% profit next week, but with continuous improvement, you can start to see the profit increase and stress decrease in a month or two. Putting some of these pieces in place, like Key Performance Indicators, will even help you keep improving your sales system and make changes to it as your business and business environment changes.
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 are able to look at the steps in your sales process, for each step write down where that information is stored, created and accessed. In a very robust sales system for every step of the sales process the information is stored, created and accessed in a client Relationship Management system (CRM for short) like Hubspot or Pipedrive. A less sophisticated system might be that the initial client name and phone number is put on a Post-it note that is given to the designer. When the designer calls back, they get an email address and store it in their Outlook contacts. When they are ready to propose the design, the client information is emailed to the accounting person who enters it in Quickbooks so a proposal can be generated.
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 means that you now can more objectively evaluate how well it is working for you, and see the areas you want to prioritize for improvement. Having this step complete means you can get more value from the next episodes where we will be discussing parts of the sales system more in-depth and covering actions you can take to improve specific parts.
In the next episode you’ll hear about some of the signs that your sales system might suck. There’s no judgment here, if you’re willing to keep using something that everyday chips away at your will to live, we all make choices. I’m just here to help you identify the places that can be different and show you there are other ways.
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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