It’s not uncommon in businesses that have a salesperson or a sales team to find the manager complaining about them “not doing enough selling”.  Well, what are they doing? Studies show that the salespersons job often involves a lot of things besides getting out there and selling.  A study of salespeople in the insurance industry found that the amount of time they spent actually selling during a 40-hour business week was a paltry 6 ½ hours, or less than 20% of their total hours worked. The rest of the time they were filling out paperwork and complying with other administrative requirements.

This situation repeats itself in many other industries. Salespeople are now doing much more than selling and the percentage of their time spent selling is decreasing. If you are concerned that not enough selling is getting done, don’t start by criticizing the salesperson. Instead, take a serious look at your sales team’s responsibilities and what you’re asking of them in the way of non-selling activities.

For example, you probably expect them to be accountable for what they are doing with their time, and that’s reasonable. But when you ask them to fill out a complicated sheet every day that outlines where they’ve been, who they’ve seen, what was discussed, what time the meeting started and finished, how much time was spent traveling to and from the meeting – that all takes time, and their time is supposed to be spent with customers and prospects.

Traditionally there’s been a lot of resistance to giving salespeople ‘too much’ independence and freedom. There has been a fear that they’ll waste time and company resources if their chain isn’t kept a bit tight. On top of that there’s the need to capture more and more information about customers so they can be segmented and marketing initiatives developed to appeal to individual segments – and it’s the salesperson who picks up a lot of the customer information that allows this. But it also means they have to spend time writing it up back in the office at some stage.

This is partly why most businesses ask their salespeople to do a lot more than just prospect and sell. They’re expected to assist in developing and managing customer relationships, to write proposals, to design and write promotional material, to gather competitor intelligence, to collect outstanding debts; and then to attend meetings and write more reports to keep head office informed of what they’re doing with their time.

It can be argued that these activities are part of their job as a salesperson since most of them are related, at least in part, to making sales and retaining customers. But that’s not the point. Selling is a skill not everybody possesses, and a good salesperson is someone to be valued, nurtured and set free to use that skill on your behalf rather than saddled with a lot of administrative activities.

So what should a salesperson’s role be restricted to? That will vary from one business to another but let’s suggest three general areas:

·       Prospecting – using their experience and field knowledge to identify prospects

·       Selling – face-to-face selling to purchasing decision makers

·       Relationship building – participating in managing customer relationships, but only as really necessary

If the members of your sales team are focused on these activities, and only these activities, their time will be spent more productively. Each of these areas has a direct relationship to the selling function that will help generate the results salespeople are supposed to achieve.  If this isn’t happening, then it’s time to change things.

Start by analyzing the non-selling activities now carried out by your sales team. For example, how much time do they spend developing presentations to new clients? These presentations can be done by administrative personnel in the office once the salesperson has briefed them on the content they want in it.  How much time do they spend managing customer relationships? It may well be time to investigate a CRM system that could shoulder some of the burden.

Look at every avenue to support your sales team. What’s needed to help them prospect for new business? What would help them spend more time selling? What parts of customer relationship management can be taken up by others in the business or by technology? Look at any option that will increase the time they spend actually selling and decrease the need for them to be involved in non-sales activities.

There does have to be a compromise reached here so as to satisfy the legitimate management need for information on what team are doing and how well they are doing it, but the goal of management should be to minimize the time salespeople spend on this and to adopt practices for such things as meetings and report writing that don’t make significant inroads into their selling time.

Most businesses spend money on advertising themselves, and some of it is well-spent. A lot of it however, is wasted, and it’s pretty hard to identify just which part of your advertising expenditure has simply disappeared out the window to little or no effect.

Yet, traditionally, some of the biggest battles in marketing have been fought out in the advertising media on the assumption that the biggest spender gets the biggest share-of-market. And perhaps in years past when there were just a few marketing channels and an equally small number of big marketers, that approach might actually have worked. There was usually a close relationship between money spent on advertising and money earned in sales.

But what must be remembered is that advertising is just one element of marketing and times have changed dramatically in the field of marketing in general. Media selection is vastly different from the world David Ogilvy knew and described in his 1963 classic Confessions Of An Advertising Man. Then, terms now in common use like ‘Internet marketing’ and ‘Guerrilla marketing’ weren’t even invented.

These days you’re as likely to see advertising on rest room walls as on television, and even objects like drink coasters and the grassy surfaces of sports grounds have become accepted advertising media.

If you’re concerned that your advertising spend isn’t bringing in the return it should be, then it’s time to start asking why.

The first question is: Who do you want to reach with your message? If you can’t get really definite about who your target audience is you’re probably wasting a lot of what you spend. And besides knowing who already buys your product, its worthwhile thinking about who else might buy it if they only knew more about it.

When you know the sort of audience you want to reach and their behavior patterns, like what they read, what they watch, what sort of messages they react to, and what events they attend, then you’ve gone a long way towards understanding which media to use to get your message out.

You can spend big on building up a brand name through the common marketing channels but still be a stranger to a whole group of potential customers who don’t tune in to these.

Try something that’s worked for some of the world’s best marketers. Cut your advertising budget by 25% or more and then try to make what’s left work just as hard in getting sales. That’s part one. Next, take what you’ve cut from advertising and use it to fund more closely-targeted marketing activities and promotions. Just making this much effort will radically change your thinking on how to promote.

Think way outside the box – consider new media, sponsorships, events and other things you’re not doing at present. Challenge yourself to come up with more original ideas. You may find that simply by focusing your attention on discovering alternatives to your present advertising you come up with a better option that lets you cut your budget and retain an effective marketing presence.

For example, if you can acquire a mailing list of the people or businesses that form your target audience you have the option of going direct to them instead of using the ‘shotgun’ approach of putting an ad in a newspaper for an article that may be irrelevant to most of the readership. If you can get your name across to the right people by such means as sponsoring your local football team or a public concert, consider how valuable that might be. There’s a lot you can do that doesn’t fall into the ‘traditional’ idea of what advertising is but still puts your business name in front of prospects.

One auto parts supplier found that by using their advertising budget to publish a magazine targeted at those who were interested in classic cars they dramatically increased their sales as well as having a profitable publication on their hands.

Marketing yourself can be done in more ways than just the traditional advertisement. You should consider all your options before planning your next campaign and see if other forms of promotion just mightn’t offer a worthwhile alternative.

We frequently talk about ‘the team’ in our businesses when we’re really just talking about the group of people who work there.  A team is a lot more than just a collection of employees; it’s people who actively work together to achieve the business’ vision and goals.

Teams don’t just happen. They’re built by forward-thinking managers who recognize the value of teamwork and actively set up the right conditions for it to flourish. In fact it takes real planning and commitment to turn a group into a team, but consider some of the business benefits:

·       Willing collaboration and sharing of ideas to develop new or better solutions for the way things get done

·       A sense of belonging that is good for individual and workplace morale by minimizing conflict and getting people engaged with their jobs

You can make a good start on building a team just by making sure you have the right foundation to build on. Here’s where to start.

1.    Develop a vision for your business: The greatest benefit of teamwork is it’s ability to get everyone pulling in the same direction.  But if the business doesn’t have a clear idea of where it is going and what it wants to achieve, then you can’t get people to look outside their own immediate task, see the bigger picture, and work towards achieving it.

2.    Prepare job descriptions: It’s helpful if every team member has a written job description that sets out their individual role and responsibilities. Without clear guidelines on what they are meant to be doing there will be a lack of focus and some argument about who is responsible for what.

3.    Improve your leadership skills: It’s a major challenge to run a group of people as a team and requires some real skill, particularly in the areas of interpersonal communication, conflict resolution and acting as a team leader rather than as the ‘boss’. If need be, take some lessons to improve these skills.

4.    Document your workplace practice policies: In the absence of agreed practices within the workplace a lot of conflict and resentment can be generated just through people ‘doing their own thing’. Set rules about potential conflict areas like smoking in the workplace, personal use of equipments and so on and sidestep these opportunities for clashes between team members.

5.    Create channels for communication: One of the defining features of a real team is the quality of communication that takes place between people. To allow that to happen, you need to create the channels, such as a regular team meeting, and a way of handling discussion that allows people to feel safe in speaking up and sharing ideas.

6.    Do some teambuilding exercises: While a lot of teambuilding happens in the workplace it can be valuable to take time out for some formal teambuilding activities. The type you choose should be suited to your team and what it does, but there’s a large range you can consider - from trust exercises to weekend retreats.

7.   Celebrate together: Build in some fun to the work routine to relieve stress and let off steam occasionally. There are any number of things you could do from workplace drinks and snacks on Friday afternoon to group outings.

Teamwork is a big asset to any business – the same number of people at work but working together better and more efficiently. But it won’t happen unless you build on solid foundations.

Even a well established small retailer can feel threatened by a large discount store moving into the neighborhood. It only gets worse if a niche single product specialist that sells one of your best moving items arrives also.

The discounter offers lower prices than you can hope to match and still survive. The other offers a specialization and depth of product knowledge that is outside your scope of operations. It doesn’t matter whether the products involved are groceries or toys, when it happens many small retailers can see the effort of their years in business going out the window and they simply give up the fight.

There are, however, those with determination to stay on and compete with these threats. And what’s more, some do a lot better than just survive – they actually come out the stronger despite a massive increase in the level of competition. 

What they don’t do is cut their prices. That’s a sure-fire way of hastening their exit. Smaller retailers simply can’t hope to match the pricing levels of the big discounters or the reach of their advertising. There’s no point in even trying.

Where they start their fight back is with a commitment – they resolve that they will find a way to manage. If you’re going in to fight, then enter the battle believing that you’re going to win. That doesn’t mean believing the unbelievable – that you’ll put the competition out of business for instance; it does mean that you should make a commitment to finding a way to keep your own business alive and healthy.

If you want evidence that it can be done, just look at any big shopping mall. Even though the big stores are magnets for customers and even though they often sell many, if not all, of the products sold by the smaller tenants in the center, still those small businesses continue to operate. That’s proof that small shops can survive beside big ones selling the same line of products. 

The very fact that big stores do attract customers means the number of prospects in your area will increase. More shoppers in your vicinity mean more opportunities for you to sell something.  Now its time to consider how you can restructure your operations to take advantage of the new volume potential you have.

Start by doing some homework on what the competition is offering. The last thing you want to do is to try to sell exactly the same thing at a higher price.  You need to differentiate yourself on the basis of something that’s got a special appeal to consumers. What combination of the products you sell will have greater appeal to consumers than what’s offered at the big place up the street? What products can you add to your range that aren’t available there?

There’s one thing most big retailers don’t have and that’s knowledgeable personnel. If you’re selling something that customers may need to ask questions about, you’ve got a real advantage. Take hardware or tropical fish as just two examples. Your expertise can go a long way towards offsetting the appeal of a discounter that can’t begin to bring your depth of knowledge to assessing exactly what will suit the customer best or to offer the same level of post sales support you do.

Give consideration to introducing new services around the products. Many small retailers have never offered home deliveries of what they sell, but this can be a big factor in competing against the large retailers who don’t offer such a service.

Servicing and repairs are other areas you can leverage.  A small retail jeweler can often replace watch batteries while customers wait, offsetting the big stores that provide this service on a next-day basis. Many big retailers depend on the manufacturer to service the products they sell and need to send them away for servicing or repair. If you can do it on your own premises and get it back to the customer quickly you’ll start to build loyalty and appreciation.

Customer service is another area where the smaller retailer can beat their bigger opponents every time.  If your team is interested, friendly, helpful and knowledgeable you’ll appeal to the vast majority of shoppers in any district, and pull them into your place of business to experience ‘old fashioned’ customer service.

You may also have to offer a guarantee on what you sell that’s better than what’s on offer from the competition, but just like service on the spot, this can really bond customers to your store. Big retailers put a lot of money into appearance so there’s no way you’ll get away with premises that don’t look first-rate. The same goes for the appearance of your team. It might be advisable to put them all into uniforms to ensure that they appear neat and tidy at all times.

Never doubt that you can compete with a big discounter or a highly specialized outlet that moves in nearby. You will definitely have to do everything you’re doing currently and then some, and you’ll certainly have to do everything better.  But with the inducement to review and improve your operations that a competitor can provide, you may someday even be thankful for that big discounter moving in up the street.

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” - Stephen Brennan