However, once the product is pretty much there, it’s time to move on to sales.  That doesn’t mean you don’t keep developing your product, but it means the main focus of your business is TO GET SALES.

The first question to ask is, “How much time do you really spend on sales or sales management each week?“

Honestly take a look at how you’re spending your time. Is it really getting sales if you’re standing around a PR event? Or networking with friends?

How much time do you spend with your target either online or in person? And if you’re lucky enough to have a sales and marketing person on the team, how much time are they spending selling? Have they been distracted by operations, shipping, paperwork, etc.

Analyze your sales funnel and see where you’re spending time.

And the next question is, “Are you tracking your sales?”

Make sure you’re measuring your sales activities and reporting them each week. Tracking gives you a reality check of where you are at—it can be exciting or motivating.

It is helpful to measure lots of different parts of the sales funnel, such as FB follows, leads, rejections, sales dollars, etc. so you can see if you’re making progress.

And compare it to the forecast. You can figure out if you need to work on getting more leads or work harder to convert them into sales.

And finally, this leads to the question, “What are you going to do about this?”

Structure your sales meeting (even if it’s with yourself), to review numbers every week, and figure out where to focus and where to find new business.

The post Sales Numbers: What are you going to do about them? appeared first on WeBC.

There are a ton of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps on the market that can help you handle your sales funnel that are relatively inexpensive ($20 to $50 per month), but you have to ask yourself if you really need them.  It takes time and energy, let alone money, to install and maintain them, let alone integrate them with all your other apps.

Here are a few questions to answer first:

• How many leads are you getting vs how many customers?
• Do you sell continually throughout the year or mostly seasonally?
• Do you have fewer customers with long sales lead times and lots of events leading to the sale, quick sales conversions, or long email campaigns to many leads?
• Do many people in your company need to talk to a prospect?
• Is your salesperson technically-oriented or not?

My suggestion for non-technical sales staff, seasonal sales, with few interactions – no CRM.  Use your Outlook/Gmail folders to separate customers vs leads.  Link email conversations. Or consider a spreadsheet that you can use to track a few key events that you check off as they happen.

For a sales process where there are lots of leads, longer lead times, or long series of events leading up to a sale – look for a CRM.

There are Apps that focus on different kinds of sales processes:

• Contact management – for sales leads that require a ton of information
• Conversations – for sales leads with multiple conversations that are hard to keep track of
• Deals – for sales management with lead scoring and win probability features
• Marketing automation – where you send a series of emails and social messaging over time
• Multipurpose CRMS – that does all of the above.

A good start is to review your sales process and the number of leads coming in that you need to deal with. Identify what type of sales process you have and then go from there.

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