The Diary of an Entrepreneur

I used to approach sales with a very softly, softly approach letting the customer be in the driving seat and reacting to the questions/communications they gave to me.

Since getting the investment last year and the explosive growth I’ve seen things have changed dramatically and I’ve had to “grow-up” in a lot of the ways I deal with the company and business in general.

One of the main things has been how I run sales. Previously it was very ad-hoc with no real marketing just letting things come to us and then not keeping a proper track of leads, opportunities and results, we had a full CRM just never used it properly, however now I see that I should have spent that extra day just learning how to use it then really buckle down with marketing our services. If I’d done that 3 years ago I could be in a very different position now.

What I’ve learnt from a sales point of view, for IT/Technology at least, is the following:

• You have to really shove all your offerings in people’s faces. That might be Google Adwords everywhere, emails to all the people you know and potential clients (If you send 500 you’ll get hopefully 8-10% response rate with good leads) or going to events with your target customers and just talk shop to them to find their requirements.
• A good CRM package is a must. Once you get more than 5 or 6 leads on the go with emails/calls back and forth it becomes almost impossible to keep track of everything for when they call you out of the blue wanting to know pricing. I used to use a book but its just not practical. Spend that £30 a month on something like Salesforce it’ll pay for itself within days!
• Set yourself weekly targets for sales. I used to get sell and if I happen to sell something then that’s good but now I set myself a target per week. These help to focus and concentrate your efforts where they matter that week.

Well that’ll do for now – I’m thinking about a post around electricity and “Green” issues!