Caroline Spelman, the Economic Secretary has just recently issued a drought declaration in the South East of England, following the same declaration in Anglia and the pending declaration in the Midlands.
In an almost ironic parallel to the current economical situation and the rate of employment, some levels of groundwater are at their lowest for almost 35 years which will have a significant impact on everything from the survival of wildlife, to food prices, to the quality of the eighteenth green at your local golf course.
Whilst the drought cannot be prevented it seems, being at the mercy of the environment, the impact can be both managed and minimised by following some considered steps now before the situation gets out of hand.
One of these remedial steps is to reduce the average time we take in a shower from five minutes to four minutes (so we are told by the experts) even to the point where a number of the water companies in the UK are providing their customers with water proof egg timers so they can keep check or and therefore reduce the amount of time they spend washing!
Similarly, many organisations are running out of customers and new business opportunities at the mercy of the current economical climate and in the same way, whilst we may not be able to control what the global economy is doing (or not doing) at a localised level, we can influence the resultant effect it has on our businesses … and taking a four minute shower is not a bad idea!
When organisations review their internal sales processes, they will more often than not find various “waste” activities in existence, where they are not utilising the resources they have available to them and instead spend a significant amount of our time and energy in non-productive, non-core sales activities. Sales people feel busy and may even look busy, but are often find themselves being busy fools.
I was facilitating a number of seminars last week at an exhibition in London, and one of the areas we discussed was Simple Selling and the importance of sometimes going back to basics and doing the simple sales things that are both proven and effective to drive sales.
When salespeople reflect back on what they do each day, and identify their personal Profit Points (those areas of activity that have the highest return for the least amount of effort), it is usually the basic elements of selling that create the greatest return on their investment of time and resources.
There is a whole suite of selling tasks and activities that can be considered to be quite simply effective and can include such things as:
As a way of addressing this in your business, try a simple exercise with your sales team, by asking each of them to map out every sale they have made in the past six months. Next to each sale, list the revenue attributed to that particular sale as well as the actual profitability of that sale (getting them to think about the elements of selling costs such as margins and the amount of resources and time required to win that sale).
Then put them in order, based on the most profitable sales they have made down to the least profitable sale. Then as a group, or 1:1, discuss what they did to win each of those high profit sales, mapping out the step by step process they took to get that customer on board and close that opportunity.
When you go through a number of these, you’ll start noticing some common activities, approaches and Proof Points that you took in order to win that higher profit business, and I would be fairly comfortable saying that in the majority of cases, these were the more back-to-basic sales activities.
Cutting out 20% of the waste activities we do in sales, earning back 20% of my profitable sales time, reducing the amount of time I spend “in the shower” working on ineffective Profit Points, I can very quickly turn a drought into a flood … and spend more time back on that eighteenth green at my local golf course!
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