Why Do You Need a Sales Growth Plan for Your Business?

This may seem like an obvious question but how many times do we move forward with an idea without a plan?  Every successful business has a plan for growth.  Whether you are building new products, expanding into new markets, or looking to grow your customer base, it is important to have a strategy in place.  The same holds true for your businesses.  It is not an easy task to find and keep new customers. Fortunately, there are a few simple strategies that can be used to increase sales and grow your business.  This article will discuss how to get started on setting up a sales growth plan for your business. It will cover the basics of what you need to do, how it can help your business, and what questions you should ask yourself to get started.

1. How to Get Started 

It is important not only to have a sales growth plan but also have it written down. Having a process that is written gives your team structure and helps them understand their roles in the company.

Questions you should ask yourself before getting started:

What are my goals?

Always start with the end in mind.  If you know where you want to go you can create a map to get you and your team there.  If you need help with mapping it out or even figuring out where you want to go, there are many resources.  You can find a mentor that has a business like you want to build.  Follow them around, ask a lot of questions.  Plenty of Contractors want to help.  Find one that is not a competitor and ask if they will teach you.  You can always contact us to start a discussion.

What are my strengths?

Be honest with yourself and your team.  Ask someone else for help.  You have some amazing strengths, make sure you are able to see them clearly for what they are.

What are my weaknesses?

Same rules apply here as above: be honest and ask others for help!  You do not have to beat yourself up over this but do not overcompensate here either.

Which parts can be improved?

You should have a good starting point but we all can improve somewhere, right?  What are you doing right and what can you do better?  Your processes are no exception.  So, do not be afraid to ask the question.

2. What are the Components?

The components of a successful sales growth plan are not always easy to define, but there are some commonalities. The following components have been found to have the most impact on the effectiveness of a company’s sales growth plan:

Market penetration

If you can navigate the current market and find a way to reach more customers through marketing, community outreach, and other things like this, it will help your business develop brand awareness.  Brand awareness is when people see your name all the time and it becomes synonymous with their need for your product when they need it.

Choose one or two major initiatives to move the needle

There may be more things that you need to do but bite off a chunk at a time and complete it before you take the next bite.  If not, you will have so many things you are chasing, and it will get confusing to you and your team.

Create a timeline with specific deadlines and milestones

Demonstrate how these initiatives will contribute to the success of the company objective

Determine who is accountable for each component 

If you can get others involved in creating your success the better off you will be, and you will not be overwhelmed with all that needs to be done.

Assign responsibility for communicating this information

Communication is paramount to your success in anything.  Make sure you have a clear line of communication between all parties, internally and externally.

3. How do You Know if Your Current Sales Growth Strategy is Working?

Ultimately, you want to know if your current strategy is working and if it’s not, you need to know what you can do differently.  Sales leaders need to ask themselves:

Am I seeing the results? Do you see growth or is it still flat?

Are we gaining new customers or are we losing them as fast as we are gaining them?

What would happen if I changed our sales growth strategy, or what would happen if I did not change our sales growth strategy?

Conclusion/Final Thoughts

It should be pretty clear if the current growth strategy is working or not.  If you are having a tough time reach out to others that can have a fresh perspective.  Find a coach or mentor that can give some clear unbiased feedback but more than likely you will know it is working because you are growing your business in both revenue and customers.  There are plenty of books and podcasts that can help you learn as well.  Here is a webinar that Pricebook Digital and I will be doing on November 16th, 2021.

Do you show multiple options to allow your customers to purchase your product or service? Why or why not?

Are there reasons to support this philosophy?

Actually, there is a lot of studies that have been done and we have referenced a couple of those along with several articles that help understand the reasoning behind giving your customers choices and how to present them.  Here are a list of the articles and studies that have been done to support this idea:

• The Way You Use Numbers Can Change Customer Behavior (and Increase Sales) According to Psychology – Ken Sterling, EVP – Bigspeak
• Are You Losing Sales By Giving Customers Too Many Choices? – Neil Patel
• Rethinking Decision Fatigue: How the Perfect Number of Choices Can Increase Conversions – SaQi K
• Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis – Article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology
• How many options should you offer customers? – Jon Persson
• When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? - Sheena S. Iyengar - Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper - Stanford University
• Single-Option Aversion - Daniel Mochon in the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.

Pricebook Digital and I held a webinar on the topic of Best, Better, Good Selling and how it can impact your business.  In the webinar, we look at the impact of the correct number of options to show your clients.  Helpful hint, it is more than one.  Whether it is selling TV's, tires or HVAC equipment.  When people have choices they make better decisions and they make them more often.

So, what are you doing to allow your customers to buy what they want, when they want to?

Check out the webinar and then contact us to learn more about how we can help you get your sales team closing more deals today.

Watch the webinar here:  Best, Better, Good Selling with Coach Chris and Pricebook

Click here to set up a free 30-minute consultation.

Is financing like a dirty word to you because you do not like to finance things yourself?  Can you separate your thoughts on money, versus their thoughts on money, when you are working with customers?  Why do we feel the need to lessen our price to build false value for our customers?  Have you ever gone to the grocery store and asked them for a cash price?  Can you go to some of the big box stores and ask for a cash price?  Then why is it acceptable for people to ask for a cash price when buying larger ticket items?  Because we have all been trained that it is acceptable.  I am not saying you should not do it, but you must account for it when you set up your price book.  Your sales team must understand what the limits are if they need to offer a discount to get the job and the consequences if they exceed that agreed upon discount level.  Why would I charge a financing fee if I am not financing this job?  Why would I charge a credit card fee if I am not using a credit card?  Should I give a cash discount or not?  All of these are good questions and should be taken into consideration when you are setting up your pricing.  The key here is that you figure out what is best for you and your business.  Some people believe that much like the grocery store that they shop at, the price is the price, whether I use cash, credit card, or financing.  But what does it look like if I add a finance charge to each of my sales tickets?  If you use financing, it can cost you upwards of 18%.  That is a lot to add to a proposal, but you must cover your costs.  If you do not, then you are losing money on that job.  That does not make good financial sense for you and your business.  There are programs out there that you can use that do not cost you a dime to finance, and they carry a higher rate for the customer. 

Some people have learned the art of the blended finance rate.  That means that every proposal that they write has a small percentage, somewhere between 4-7%, that gets added and does not get removed whether they are using the financing or not.  How do I know what a good, blended rate would be for me and my company?  If you have good bookkeeping for your company, you will have an idea of what you are spending on financing costs every year.  If you know what that overall cost is per year you can break that down to a percentage of sales and see what your financing percentage is per year.  Then you charge that or a little more than that to cover your financing on every job.  If you have annual sales of $1,500,000 and you spent $85,000 in financing costs that works out to be 5.66% of your total sales.  I would then use a 6% financing rate to add to all my installation jobs to cover that for the year.  Adding it to the overall cost of the job and not allowing my sales team to remove that percentage or they lose part of their commission.  It is not mean to hold the salespeople responsible for charging the proper amount for the jobs they sell so that your company can be profitable before and after you pay them.  That is part of their job.  Using a blended rate can mean more profits and is a cost of doing business with some companies.

If you are not charging the proper amount on your install tickets, then your business can be suffering or just getting by.  If you do not have a plan for making profits, then you will struggle to succeed or not be around very long.  Also, if you want to grow or have to replace old worn-out equipment, then you need to make money regularly.  You cannot expect to just make money when you need it, like on a rainy day.  How profitable are you or do you want to be?  Is it unreasonable to expect to make 8-12% net margin?  I do not know one person that got into HVAC, Plumbing or the Electrical business as a charitable organization.  If you have questions on how your business can be more profitable, reach out to us today to discuss how we can help you and your business.

“When the going gets tough, I'm not always sure what you do. I'm not saying that I know how to fix everything when the going gets tough, but I do know this: when the going goes tough, you don't quit. And you don't fold up. And you don't go in the other direction.” -  John Madden

I was blessed to grow up playing organized sports, I even got to play collegiate football, and those sports taught me a lot of lessons, probably most important was resilience.  There is a mental toughness that can be learned from playing sports for a length of time.  You develop the ability to work through, tough and uncomfortable situations.

Sales requires a similar type of mental toughness.  You hear NO a lot and rejection is not something that most people can handle on a regular basis.  If you are in sales, you were probably built for this!  Not many people can do sales effectively.  There are many people who try but some succeed because they were born for this.  Some people are born to be scientist, astronauts, medical personnel, trainers, motivational speakers, and some were born to be in sales.  If you are in sales and are successful, then you understand what it takes to sit with someone and understand how to find their needs and wants and apply your knowledge about your product or service to help meet those needs and wants.  Sometimes you do a good job and sometimes you fail, then you learn.  You learn because you are resilient.  You have a mental toughness that pushes you to find a better way, a different or better solution.

Take time today to learn from the “NO” responses and find a better solution and find your resolve to be a better salesperson.  Learning to work through or around the obstacles or objections is what good salespeople do, consistently.

If you want to improve your sales skills, set an appointment and let's have a discussion.  We would like to understand your current situation, what you want to accomplish, and what could be getting in the way.  Then we can determine if partnering with Coach Chris makes sense, or not.  Thank you for your consideration.

Having the proper salespeople and compensation plan in place will always help grow your business.  There are many tools to help you get the right people and the right compensation plan in place, but do you know where to start?  Take the first step find a coach that can help you with all areas of your business or if you need help in specific areas then call the specialist.  What makes a great salesperson?  What makes a great comp plan?  Listen to this short clip or to the whole podcast from the links below.

Check out the full podcast with Kathy Svetina and Coach Chris as they discussion how you can grow your business.

Reach out to Kathy here and see what she can do to help your woman-owned business as a Fractional CFO.

Reach out to Coach Chris here to discuss your sales goals.