You know your sales machine is working in the right direction when you have people coming to your business more than you are reaching out to them to bring them into your business. Once the demand cycle swings your way and most of your growth related activity is spent following up on leads you now are in the enviable position of responding to demand, not creating it. Unfortunately, until your business reaches this exciting level of nirvana, your sales machine is responsible for driving and creating demand. And, once you successfully create demand, the other challenge is maintaining and developing it.
At its fundamental core, the most important component of the demand process is knowledge. For it is through the application of knowledge from our successful experiences that we are able to examine, understand, duplicate, and repeat those accomplishments.
Every single successful sales engagement is a lesson.
If you do not treat each of your selling successes as an isolated incident, you miss out on the opportunity to identify and understand the components of the sales process that worked; and, when laid out next to your other successes, recognize the repeating patterns in your successful experiences. Though some success may, in fact, be an accident or blind luck; repeatable success defined by a process that has been designed through experience and knowledge.
As you begin to explore the question of what do we need to do to create demand and build a stable, reliable growth machine there are several components that you must examine and understand in order to create something that systematically drives demand and improves revenues:
- Know who buys from you and why.
- Know the process that was followed to turn people from cold prospect to passionate client.
- Know what your best clients value and what they continue to expect and look for.
- Know where other businesses like your best clients are.
- Know how to connect into that market or group.
- Know what tools, tactics, and resources are necessary to generate information and awareness with those future clients.
- Know how to communicate in a consistent manner with your market using the language of the lessons of your successful experiences.
- Know your clients’ story – what they loved, why they value your business, why they value the relationship.
- Know how to share your clients’ story with others.
- Know how to integrate your functional activities of sales and marketing into a collaborative, supportive process.
- Know how to continually measure and track your success.
- Know how to modify your strategy to reflect new and valid knowledge.
- Know how to educate your sales team and incorporate into their daily activities the behaviors that reflects and supports success.
The success of your growth strategy requires the necessary information, knowledge, feedback, and understanding to make your accomplishments repeatable. The challenge for most organizations is instilling the discipline to learn, understand and indentify what works, why it works, and how to make it repeatable. The next step is incorporating this knowledge into a management and educational philosophy and process that puts into practice.
Driving demand is not rocket science. There is no fancy formula or secret. All it really takes is a fundamental commitment to discovering the most efficient way to be productively successful and convert that into a process that empowers the organization to be repeatedly successful.