🏠  It’s Not a Sales Problem
🚧   Fix Operations to Sell
🎧   Customer Intimacy
đźŹÂ It’s Not a Sales Problem
Almost without exception, when I hear “We have a sales problem,” I immediately look for the problem outside of sales.
This was my anchoring story in Sticky Branding, now available on Audible.
When I joined my family business we thought we had a sales problem. Revenue was in decline and we were struggling to gain traction.
It got so bad that we implemented “Pit Time,” or six hours of outbound cold calling per week. I remember being in the trenches with my sales team smiling and dialing trying to “win logos.”
It was brutal! Worse still, we were acquiring terrible customers. They were unprofitable, unethical, and unpleasant to work with.
Things didn’t change until we took a step back and studied our customers, market, and business. We learned we didn’t have a sales problem like we originally thought, we had lost relevance.
During the recession of the early 2000s, our competitors shifted to a wholesaling model offering high volume, low cost IT staffing services. We didn’t get the memo! We were still operating on the model that worked in the nineties.
The insight was powerful, and led to a massive change in our business, including a new name, new positioning, and new operational model. The changes worked, and within nine months we rocketed into growth mode and never looked back.
Again and again, this type of story has played out in the past decade. I will hear comments like:
- We have excess capacity. If we grow to X revenue we will be successful.
- We’re not bringing on new customers, and revenue has slowed or declined. We need more sales.
- We’ve just invested in equipment or had a hiring surge and need to increase sales to cover the overhead.
All of these issues masquerade as sales challenges, but they aren’t resolved in sales. They’re resolved by fixing your product-market fit (or value proposition), and investing in the right operations to meet your customers’ needs.
🚧 Fix Operations to Sell
Flagging sales is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, and it points to one of two issues:
1. Loss of Brand Relevance
When sales become challenging the first place to look is externally. What may have shifted in your marketplace that is impacting customer preference and your competitive advantage?
Shifts can happen from a variety places:
- Economic
- Competitive
- Regulatory
- Political
- Technological
- Black swan event
Whatever the force, the rules are changing and your company’s value proposition is eroding. And you will feel it in your sales. Sales become harder, more expensive, slower, and it feels like your fighting in the street with knives for every new piece of business.
The issue is not a sales challenge. It’s a product-market fit challenge. You need to identify and validate new growth markets, adjust your products and services to meet current customer needs, and optimize your business for a new market reality.
2. Misaligned or Inadequate Operations
Falling close on the heels of loss of brand relevance are operational gaps. And often the two issues are linked, because the market changed and your operations are not well designed for a new market reality.
Look to resolving key operational issues to improve throughput and relevance:
- Eliminate overhead, such as people, equipment, or buildings that no longer serve or meet current market demand.
- Increase throughput to improve the speed of delivery while reducing the size of your backlog.
- Increase customer satisfaction by reducing the volume of change requests, returns, and customer support requests.
When you fix your operational gaps, sales tend to sort itself out because you are naturally meeting customer demand.
One Stat to Watch
77%
of business owners say their costs have risen by an average of 18%, but they’ve only raised prices by 12%, according to Bank of America.
🎧 Customer Intimacy
When in doubt, listen. Your customers will tell you what they want to buy.
One of the most effective ways to listen is ironically by selling.
Meet with your customers and listen. Truly listen to their issues and needs, and take that intelligence back to your leadership and operations teams.
When you listen and adapt your products and services to meet your customers’ needs, you will gain brand relevance, improve operations, and drive profitable growth.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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