On the 8th day of Business Planning my true love gave to me… SALES SYSTEMS!

Let’s face it, nothing happens in business unless a sale is made. And yet, most people spend precious little time evaluating this area of their business. A successful sales facet requires purposefully and thoroughly looking at your sales system from start to finish and understanding the best ways to manage all your sales activities.

Have you determined what your sales funnel looks like? By this, we mean everything involved in the acquisition of leads all the way through to closing the sale.

1. What are the different ways that people are attracted to your offerings?
2. How do you qualify a prospect’s ability and urgency to invest in your offerings?
3. What are you doing to nurture that relationship until the prospect is ready to take action?
4. How are you communicating with them all the way through to a successful completion of that sale?

STOP NOW and write down the life cycle of your prospect. In order to close more sales, you need to look at each level of contact you have with the prospect and ask, “How can we be doing this more effectively?” Have each salesperson on your team create a Strategic Plan of how they will meet their goals through existing clients, new clients and/or expanded products and services. Ensure that it isn’t just an IDEA; it has to be a clearly-defined action plan along with achieve by dates attached to their goals.

Tomorrow, YOUR Day 9 of the 12 Days of Business Planning will address post-closing customer retention. Stay tuned!