Sales channels to reach your customers
Selling through retailers, wholesalers and other distributors
Selling through an intermediary may be a more cost-effective way of reaching your end-customers than selling to them directly.
If you are targeting business customers who prefer to deal with large suppliers, selling directly to them may not be a realistic option. Instead, you might aim to supply wholesalers who have existing relationships with those businesses.
If individual consumers buy low value quantities of your products, the best option might be to target retailers that sell similar products. Or you might choose to focus your efforts on a relatively small number of wholesalers who can in turn supply your products to many retailers.
Other distribution channels may also reach your end-customers. For example, technology suppliers often sell to resellers who can configure and install the technology to suit end-users’ particular needs.
Managing your distributors
You need distributors who will value your product. If they sell competing products, what will make them push yours?
Kelloggs Corn Flake modern trade marketing agent
Think about how you set your prices. Distributors will be more enthusiastic if they can make a large profit – but setting too low a price will eat into your own margins.
Effective advertising and promotions can be vital. As well as marketing to the distributor, you can promote your products directly to end-customers. Distributors will be keener to stock and sell products that their customers are asking for.
The key terms of the supply relationship should be covered in a written contract. Key issues might include:
Kelloggs Corn Flake modern trade marketing agent
how much stock the distributor will hold
what the distributor will do to promote your products
how quickly you can resupply and minimum order levels
whether the distributor has exclusive rights to your product (for example, in a particular territory)
what happens if either you or the distributor want to end the relationship
Business ideas, Marketing and sales , promotions and advertising ideas , articles
Get the Sales Team Selling
Get the Sales Team Selling
brianoconn
Business Tips, Social Selling
December 22, 2014April 27, 2016
5 Minutes
To win more customers and grow, every business needs to focus on getting the sales team selling, they need to get sold on sales actions and sales time not just the companys sales process. One question any salesperson needs clarification on is what do you want me to do. Seems like a easy question for a sales leader to answer,Go sell. So what does selling actually mean in your business?, is it revenue, margin, revenue by product line, number of new deals?. Once upon a time selling was easily quantified. In the day of the door to door sales, all a sales person needed was the product to demo and enough streets with enough door bells to ring. Simple numbers game, keep knocking until someone opens, give the sales pitch and close.
Today in the digital era, sales has moved inside, online, blended, push,pull, hunter,miner, gatherer and the systems supporting the sales process have gotten more complicated. First we had contact management with software programs like Goldmine, then came CRM and now Sales Force Automation.Which makes me wonder, has actual selling time got second billing to the sales process?, are sales people more engaged in the sales process and systems than the actual selling itself?. Maybe its time to spend longer fighting for more sales!
Sales models for many companies have become more complex and less efficient in the quest for data, putting pressure on the rate they can acquire customers, productivity and even shifting the focus point from selling time to process time.
The guiding principle of all sales and marketing teams is to maximise selling time, lead generation and relationship building. That may sound obvious to any sales leader, but it is important to remember that the drive for data and sales insights can collide with the forces of rising complexity in the sales process. In fact, sales teams can over time slip comfortable into being sales processors against being sales winners. Companies must understand and clarify the scope of their sales teams while promoting efficiency throughout the sales process.
There are thousands of ways to kill a sale but only a few ways to win them. Some ways to kill a sale are obvious like not showing up to a meeting prepared, not following up, not listening, not establishing a realtionship, going to proposal too early, not speaking to decision makers
the list goes on. These can be easy to identify and with some training and practice can be overcome.
Then there are the sales killers that hide beneath the surface that many companies and sales managers do not even know exist. These are the sales weaknesses in the sales process (over reporting anyone?) which when combined with a salespersons own make-up can act like weights pulling down the sales efforts and results.
Aligning your selling efforts with sales process takes work. Sometimes companies can be cautious about meddling with the sales forcedirectors and even owners need to overcome the common fear that disrupting it will hamper revenue or market intelligence. Then, other stake holders from not only sales, marketing and sales support but also other functions, such as finance, must work together to identify and prioritise the expected outputs from the sales engine. Next, successful sales teams transformations require support from the very top: someone has to take the lead, get the senior people from across the company to sit down, share data, and be willing to talk about whats not working. This leader must override internal concerns, see the big picture, and focus on the best solutions to boost the time spent selling regardless of past practices.
Changing the sales focus and sales teams activities may mean changing the sales talent as successful sales teams refocusing may change how people carry out their roles and the ways other stakeholders interact, from customers to marketing and back offices.
Finally, winning back and protecting selling time for sales people to sell requires vigilance. The growth of multi channels marketing and sales channels in the B2B and B2C markets can demand non-selling activities into the sales teams day. In addition, old habits chip away at selling time: a salespersons ingrained response when a customer needs a quick answer to something is to drop everything and dive in, even when a well mapped out sales support or customer support mechanism is in place to handle any issue faster and better. The new mantra has to be A sales teams time is better used to sell.
An example of refocusing the sales team selling time, was an Internet company who set aggressive targets for sales metrics such as the number of new customer interactions per week. Giving the sales people goals they could not meet without changing their behavior forced them to adopt to the change in sales focus. Success became self-reinforcing: the more they stayed in the business of selling the better they performed.
In larger companies, viewing sales operations across departments may not be easy, nor is implementing changes that affect the entire sales process. Yet the more sales operations can be streamlined and admin reduced, the more likely customer satisfaction will improve as deals close quickly and sales pipeline grows faster. At these companies, the result can often be millions of Euros in higher revenues and lower sales costs.
Get the right sales people and channel in front of the customer at the right time.
It may not be enough to transform the sales teams by hiring people with the skills and capabilities to sell solutions to target sectors. Companies might have to restructure their sales coverage model, which means defining the sales roles differently. The questions to ask, include how much hunting versus gathering capacity to employ; what the role of sales specialists should be; whether to use one or multiple sales people to serve a segment or customers across different geographies.
When to hunt for new customers and when to mine deeper within current customers is one of the answers that needs to be made explicit to any sales team. Too many sales people often get comfortable serving their current customers, so an obvious initial step is to charge them with becoming more aggressive about mining the largest customers to their full potential. At the same time, however, the life blood of any business is acquiring new customers.
Thats why an effective coverage model needs to be deliberate about who should be hunting and where. Sales managers should meet regularly with hunting sales people to understand and actively refine their target prospects and beach-head plans. Given the degree of sales difficulty and the strategic value of acquiring new customers, sellers should receive a compensation recognition for breaking into new accounts.
Whether hunting,farming or mining, its critical to get the mix and sequence of sales skills, sales training and specialists right. Do not ignore a sales stream because theres no sales expert in-house to cover the area with the skills the target customers considers crucial.
Sales people need to learn and be taught how to orchestrate effective teaming. Like musicians who seamlessly improvise back and forth after they have played together several times, salespeople who get to know and trust one another tend to sell together more effectively.
Sales people need to get sold on selling again,
They need to understand that new customer conversations are a priority, building and expanding relationships is more important that a spreadsheet and get the answer to what do you want me to do?.
Share this:TwitterFacebookPocketLinkedInRedditTumblrPinterestLike this:Like Loading…
Related
Sales Lead GenerationIn “Business Tips”Sales Strategy PlanIn “Business Strategy”Social Media Selling for SalesIn “Business Tips”
Taggedleadershipmanagementsalessales leadershipsales managementsales managersales processsales teamSales Trainingsellingselling time
Published by brianoconn
Online Sales training programs and online sales training courses via The Digital Sales Institute. Passion for helping salespeople succeed in their sales career.
View all posts by brianoconn
Published
December 22, 2014April 27, 2016
Post navigation
Previous Post Lead GenerationNext Post A Strategy for Business Success
2 thoughts on Get the Sales Team Selling
Pingback: Sales Strategy Plan The Bitter Business
Pingback: Seek Inspiration from Your Small Business Community
Comments are closed.
Sales Training Articles and Tips
Business Strategy (47)
Business Tips (43)
Free Business Tools (4)
Sales Training (19)
Social Media Marketing (42)
Social Selling (44)
Category CloudBusiness Strategy Business Tips Free Business Tools Sales Training Social Media Marketing Social Selling
Blog at WordPress.com.
