In my work, I sometimes hear: “We’ve never seriously analyzed our sales, but great people deal with customers / production, we’re in the black, so we don’t have to worry too much about the nuances of customer acquisition, right?” Unfortunately not. Let me explain how sales relations with other areas of the company look. Contrary to what you may believe, it’s not just about structured sales meaning more cash in your account.
Let’s assume that about 170 dedicated offers were sent to potential customers during one year. Each of them was tailored to the situation of a specific recipient, and it took the time of a specialist who performs the service on a daily basis.
In addition, you had to talk to the company that received the offer, arrange a meeting and exchange a few emails – it took about 2 hours of work. After analyzing the data, it turned out that 40 offers were sent to leads where the contact person was not a decision maker.
Only 3 leads out of these 40 eventually became customers of this company, and the revenues generated by them barely covered the costs invested in servicing the entire 40. This meant that if the talks were ended whenever there was no contact with the decision-maker, the company’s profits almost wouldn’t change, but it would “recover” an additional 80 hours of work (40 dedicated offers, 2 hours of work needed to bring leads to the stage of the sent offer).
80 working hours is 10 working days or 2 working weeks, i.e. additional:
As you can see, order in sales can “produce” time that can be invested in HR, marketing, sales, finance and any other department of the company – all thanks to, for example, decisions supported by numbers and more conscious preparation of dedicated offers. Usually services are priced by a higher class of specialists, which is why we aren’t talking about the time of the intern. Sometimes we even mean the time devoted by the CEO.
Creating dedicated offers, only when it makes sense, is not the only way to organize sales – there are a number of factors that can help B2B companies assess the potential of each lead.
At individual companies with whom we had the opportunity to work, we have noticed that:
Each of these companies could ask the first question for a potential client and, depending on the answer, determine how much effort should be invested in further talks.
Let’s assume that by ordering sales, we’ll be able to identify companies with the greatest potential faster and better convince them to cooperate. As a result, the customer service department will more often work with the clients they actually like working with, which can result in:
The company is a system of connected vessels — some of the problems of each department in the company have its source in sales supported only by intuition and experience. The sales mess creates not only additional costs in the company, but also additional efforts for other employees.
Chief of Operations is a position that occupies a special place among managerial staff of large…
This article will help you learn how to hire new people easier, you just need a…
One million zlotys of annual revenue is 83,333 PLN per month. If you have a subscription-based…