Fix Revenue Problems: 3 Steps to a Proactive Sales Strategy

We write a lot here about Selling. Selling Best Practices, Selling Value, Sales Strategy—but we’re not just speaking to the Sales Reps.

If you’ve got a business, you are in sales—and that goes for nonprofits too.

When we’re asked to come in to a business it’s usually because of one of these 3 issues:

1. Stagnant Growth
2. Slow Revenue
3. Shrinking Margins

Stagnant Growth: are you “waiting” for customers to find you or walk through the door?

Slow Revenue: Are sales unpredictable or is customer response sluggish?

Shrinking Margins and Profit: Is your overhead eating into your profit while you wait for customers?

Do you recognize any of these symptoms of revenue problems?

Most businesses owners look to marketing and advertising to try to correct these issues and sometimes those efforts are successful BUT, with revenue issues, spending more money to hope there is a return on investment is a big, big, BIG risk. Hope is not a strategy. Hope is a last resort.

That’s why we always pre-empt advertising and marketing spend by building a proactive sales strategy to drive revenue back into the business. Fixing revenue issues as quickly and as lean as possible is where we start. 

3 Steps to a Proactive Sales Strategy You Can Execute in Any Business

1. Identify target customers: Who can benefit from your product? Where can you find them?
2. Develop specific value-centric customer sales messages: What’s important to these potential customers? How does your product/service fill their needs better than other options? Are you speaking in customers’ “currency”?
3. Go out, reach out to your target customers and sell: How are you going to connect with these prospective customers? Do you have consistent touch points in place to stay relevant and engaged with prospective customers? Are you employing technology or digital means to scale your efforts?

Find a balance in your business for operations, production and business development. When you’re busy and knee deep in serving existing customers, it’s easy to forego new customer development for current customer fulfillment. Don’t do it.  

Being “open for business” doesn’t mean that you wait. Waiting is dangerous. Waiting is slow and painful and risky. Even if you’re a retailer, who says you have to only hang around your store to make sales?

Be Proactive. Be Aggressive.

Go out and find your customers. Get out of the store, the office, get offline and use a sales strategy to make some face to face happen and drive revenue back into your business.