The Sales Pipeline

Matrix Key:  Financial Viability - Marketing and Sales - Sales Pipeline

"It's not your customer's job to remember you.  It's your job to make sure the customer doesn't forget you." - Patricia Fripp

It's rare that anyone sells something at the very first client meeting.  Sales is a process, and your sales pipeline consists of customers at different stages of the sales cycle. The WholeLife Matrix gives you the tools to develop a discipline for your sales pipeline activities. A good sales person can effectively manage customers at all points of the sales process, and manage a constantly flowing pipeline without dropping anything out.

Here are four necessary actions for building and managing your sales pipeline:

1. Qualifying Potential Clients
2. Consistently Adding Names to the Client Database
3. Keeping the Client Database Current
4. Staying in Touch with Clients

We will address specific sales actions in other blogs, but it's crucial to first create a structure for tracking clients, prospects, and deals as they make their way through the sales cycle.  Your client database is the foundation of your sales pipeline, and the framework for a winning sales plan.

Are you ready to win?

Opportunities For Sales

Matrix Key:  Financial Viability - Marketing and Sales - Opportunities For Sales

"Ability is of little account without opportunity." - Napoleon Bonaparte

We talk a lot about sales because sales is the heartbeat of every business. On the WholeLife Matrix, sales is a key component of Financial Viability. It doesn't matter if you make widgets or provide services, you must focus on getting people to buy.  Sales don't just show up on your doorstep.  In order to create sales, you must know how and where to create opportunities for sales, and you must consistently take action to create those opportunities.

Here are the four best ways to create opportunities for sales:

1. Referrals
2. Social Networking
3. Upselling Current Customers
4. Re-engaging Prior Customers

Sales is a process of having conversations with people who have a need for your product or service.  The more conversations you have, the more sales you have.  If you put together a plan for creating sales and use these four tools for finding opportunities, you will soon have a wealth of possibilities for winning in a competitive marketplace.

Are you ready to win? 

Financial Viability

Matrix Key:  WholeLife Matrix - Financial Viability

"Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out." - John Wooden

The first quadrant of the WholeLife Matrix is Financial Viability.  For most business owners and entrepreneurs, Financial Viability is top of mind and sometimes all consuming.  Without a financially successful business, it is hard to achieve balance in all the other areas of your life.  

The Financial Viability quadrant identifies the four key essentials to a healthy, thriving business:

1. Profitability and Finances
2. Resource Management
3. Marketing and Sales
4. Production and Delivery

 These are the four legs of your financial viability table.  You have to make sure you are putting equal effort into each of these four aspects of your business.  Future blogs will detail some of the actions to take in each of these areas.  For now it is important to note that each of these components affects the others, and all four must be operating in tandem and very efficiently.

Business owners and managers have a lot to do and handle every day in order to be financially viable.  By breaking down the business into segments, it will be easier to identify strengths and weaknesses as well as delegate actions to the appropriate teams.  When you have your Financial Viability game plan in place, it will be much easier to win the game of business.

Are you ready to win?

Starting Your Marketing Plan

“Our success is a direct result of knowing how to market a brand and having the right people representing the brand.” – Greg Norman – Professional Golfer and Entrepreneur

We all know we need to have a sales and marketing plan if we expect to meet our sales objectives. Last week we talked about the key elements of a Sales and Marketing plan. But what’s the best way to get started on a designing a system that will generate results?

Perform a SWOT Analysis. Your SWOT analysis will show you what’s working now and what resources you currently have to begin a disciplined marketing plan. The SWOT analysis shows you where you need to expend extra resources and where you can hit the ground running.

Define Your Conditions of Satisfaction for a Client. Who is your ideal customer? Who needs your product or service? What are your minimum orders? What tolerance do you have for high-maintenance customers? Take time to get clear on who you want to be doing business with and who you’re going to pass on. Not all sales are good sales.

Create a Marketing Budget. How much do you have to spend on marketing? And over what period of time? Based on your ideal client profile, what are the best avenues for reaching out to those clients? With the funds you have available, can you reach enough people to achieve your sales intention? Do you need to look for additional resources for marketing? How can you creatively stretch your budget, for instance, aligning with complimentary service providers and sharing some advertising costs?

Determine How Many Hours You Will Commit. Your marketing budget isn’t just financial. You also have to budget your time and commit to how many hours a week you will devote to networking, phoning, blogging, or whatever marketing activities will yield results. These hours have to be scheduled into your calendar, and you have to show up.

Get the Right People on Your Marketing Bus. If you don’t have enough time to market, consider hiring some part time help or delegating some marketing tasks to your staff. That being said, you need to make sure you’ve got the right people reaching out to prospects and contacts. Not everyone enjoys or is well-suited to marketing. Be sure to communicate your intentions and create a common vision that is shared by your whole team. If one person is not generating results, reorganize tasks or hire someone else.

Once you have the building blocks in place, your marketing plan will be much easier to implement. Taking these initial steps will ensure that you are pursuing the right kinds of clients and using your resources wisely. The key here is to make sure your sales intentions are always at the top of your mind, and remain the driving force behind your budget, time and marketing decisions. When you put the right kind of gas in the car, you have a much better chance of winning the race!

Are you ready to win?

Identifying Prospects - Knowing Where to Win

“The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” Gary Player, South African Champion Golfer

One of the first and most important keys to successful selling is identifying and qualifying prospects. It’s well worth your time to search out and pursue prospects who have a high likelihood of buying your product. The more calls you make to people who have a need for what you’re selling, the more often you will convert those calls to paying customers.

Assess your product – Know what you’re selling, what it costs, and how it can help your prospects. Start thinking about who is in a position to buy that product. If it costs $10,000, don’t pursue clients who have a $5,000 budget.

Ask questions. Determine what your client needs and wants. If they want pizzas, don’t try to sell them caviar. If you sell caviar, look for places where there are likely to be people to buy caviar. If you have a broad range of products or services, take time to zero in on what your prospect feels will fill their needs. If you sell pizza and caviar and your prospect wants pizza, sell them pizza. Maybe you can interest them in extra toppings, but don’t waste your time asking them to buy caviar if that isn’t what they want.

Go where the good prospects are. Join networking groups where there will be people who need your product. Professional associations, leads clubs, chambers of commerce, all of these are excellent resources for meeting new people and potential clients. The more specific the association is to your ideal client type, the more likely you will make contacts that are useful.

Check the competition. Who are your competitor’s clients? Are they buying what you’re selling, but not from you? Maybe you can offer a better deal or a more customized product. Study what’s selling at other companies and consider how you can distinguish your product in the marketplace.

Research other available data. The internet is an amazing resource that can provide you with lists of companies that are in your industry, are of the size range you market to, are in your geographic area, or match up to some other indicator of being an ideal prospect. Spend time daily reading blogs or annual reports to learn more about your target market.

Referrals, referrals, referrals. The best way, hands down, to identify a prospect is for someone to refer you. If you have good relationships with your clients, ask them for referrals and ask them often. You will be surprised at how many times your clients know people who can use your product or service. With a referral, your client has laid the groundwork that gives you an automatic edge. Your client has, in essence, prequalified the prospect for you.

By taking a little time to research and focus your efforts on reaching out to the right people, your sales efforts will be more productive and profitable. And you will be winning the game of sales.

Are you ready to win?

Cold Calling 2 Win

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging." - Hank Aaron - American Baseball Player

Successful cold calling is dependent on your getting-started attitude. The law of large numbers says, the more "no's" you get out of the way, the closer you are to getting to "yes!" The best way to succeed is to be prepared and to keep swinging.

There are four basic elements to an effective cold calling campaign:

1. Qualify your prospects: Begin with a list and qualify your prospects; make sure this list includes businesses that need your products or services and can afford to buy them. Attain key contacts who can make buying decisions.


2. Be prepared: Do your homework on the company and the industry. Know their key competitors and research some best practices that can add value to their business. Then create a script with which you feel comfortable and include a brief introduction and an interesting third party story about a company similar to theirs who is already using your products or services.


3. Turn cold calls into warm calls: Do a relationship map and find someone in your company or at another client’s organization who may know the prospect. Get a referral and find commonality. When you have common ground, you know the same people, or you can talk about something you know interests them, people are more warmed up to the call. Approach them on neutral turf by attending networking events or trade shows where they may be present. Find out if your prospect plans to attend and make it a point to run into them. Provide some value: give them a free assessment or a promotional item that would be of great interest to the buyer, something that will catch their attention.


4. Follow up: Timing is very important, don’t let too much time pass between that first meeting and your next phone call. Follow up when you said you would, but don't flood their machine with messages. Keep calling until they answer the phone. When you want to schedule an appointment, offer a specific time; don’t leave it open-ended. Ask for only 10 minutes of time to make your pitch. People are very busy, and your call was likely an unplanned interruption. Make it short and sweet and show them you respect their time. During the conversation, find their “hot buttons.” Continue to schedule future brief conversations so they feel they know you, find value in your product and are ready to buy.

Once you’ve got them on the phone and they are intrigued, remember the 80/20 rule. Listen 80% of the time and speak only 20% of the time. People want to buy from people who they feel understand them, their issues and can provide value. They love to speak about themselves, so give them plenty of opportunity. Ask key questions that will reveal how they like to buy and show them how your product fits those specific needs. Keep swinging, and before you know it, you'll have a growing list of paying customers, and that is a recipe for winning.

Are you ready to win?

The Marketing Plan

"The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital."

Joe Paterno, Head Football Coach, Penn State University

1. A Marketing Plan is a Map

Having a plan is the first step to getting someplace. If you were lost in a new city the first thing you would do is ask for directions and get a map. You must have a written sales plan that you use every day if you really want to have sales occur in your business.

Without opportunities for sales you will not have sales. It’s that simple. In today’s current market conditions, our strategy is to market ten times more than you ever have before. You must create a plan that includes sales activities that haven’t been happening. (We know it can be intimidating, but when you have a written plan, you can do it!) Networking, calling former clients, building your client database, putting out a newsletter, reworking your web site – all these actions will create opportunities for sales.

The plan must be on paper and it must be shared with everyone in the sales department

2. Action makes something happen

Actions are what make things happen. When we convert an idea into action we move the project forward. Thinking about it, feeling about it and creating a plan without action does not produce results. You need to create accountabilities and ways to keep the projects in existence. Coming up with a good idea and having everybody agree to it is nice, but unless you meet weekly, measure the results and agree on what is going to happen next, the plan will drop out of existence. And that means less sales.

3. Time is required when anything is accomplished

The one thing that is always present when anything happens is a period of time. If you do not block out a period of time to make something happen it will not get done. This is a key ingredient to the success of any plan. Carving out the time in your calendar to make something happen is the only way to insure that it will, in fact, occur.

4. Planning +Action+Time= Results

Planning +Action+Time= Results is the secret formula for making something happen. Implement this strategy, and you will always have success. You are on the right path to winning when all of these ingredients are included in your project. Make sure you play to win by using this strategy now in your marketing plan. Let us know how it works for you.

Are You Ready to Play the Game?

Key Business Success Strategies

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
Will Rogers, Actor/Lecturer/Humorist

Every winning team has key success strategies that are the basis for their decisions on the playing field. These are the strategies that remain constant despite change - different players, different opponents, and different circumstances.

In business you need strategies that hold true no matter the market conditions. These are the basic fallback positions that keep your business on track in a challenging economy. At Possibilities Unlimited, we believe that the three key success strategies are:

1. Structure your business to make a profit under current market conditions
2. Do not allow for anything in your business that is not working
3. Market ten times more than you have ever done before

Structure your business to make a profit under current market conditions
The basic law of business is “Thou Shalt Make a Profit!” If you violate that law, you will lose the right to do business. Your business will be permanently in the penalty box. You must at all times structure your business or your department to make a profit. You must bring in more money than you spend.

Your business coach is there to help you make the hard decisions that will keep your business lean and profitable. Getting help from someone who does not have an agenda or something to gain from your business situation makes it easier to get the job done faster with better results.

Do not allow for anything in your business that is not working
Now is the time to throw overboard anything on the boat that is not needed. Any person, system or product that is not contributing to profitability, to moving toward the goal line, needs to be eliminated. Stop allowing for anything that does not work in your business or your department. You need to be running 20% more efficiently that you ever dreamed possible.

Now is the time to get the right people into your starting lineup.You want to move the ball down the court, and that will only happen when the right people are working together and they are all working from the same playbook. The more cohesive the team, the more efficient the business and the lower the operating costs. All these things combine to make you more competitive and boost your results in the game of business/life.

Market ten times more than you ever have before
Market, Market, Market! Now is the time to get into the marketplace. This is no time for order-takers. The people sitting back waiting for the phone to ring are the ones having problems in today’s economy. If you have been marketing then increase it by ten times. (If you devote one hour a week to making sales calls, bump it up to ten hours a week.) Create more opportunities for sales. Build a pipeline of opportunities for sales. Sales are the foundation of your business, the touchdowns, the three-pointers from center court. If you want to win the game, you have to have points on the board. You have to have sales happening all the time.

Are you ready to win?