Selling is a Daily Thing

In my business, I work with a lot of companies that are founded by Engineers and Technicians. They usually have something that no one else has. They usually are great at delivery and that is what they grow a business on. They can deliver a product or a service that no one else can (at least in their minds).

Here is the problem with that discipline: sooner or later, someone grows a business beyond their own ability to deliver, or to create and organization to deliver and the business that can deliver 1/2 as good but sell 3 times as good starts to beat them. Here is what you need to do avoid that trap: measure the activity that drives sales daily. . . yes, that’s right; I don’t care if your sales cycle is 3 months, 3 quarters or 3 years, you can still measure sales activity daily.

It could be invoices sent, RFP’s responded to, proposals given, white papers downloaded, website traffic, web forms filled out, etc. Check it and measure it daily. Drive the activity that will drive it daily. Here is why: you will find innovations, breakthroughs, and tools that you never knew about because you are measuring every day. Your sales cycle will shorten by 25% to 30% because you are measuring the activity every day. It really becomes about awareness but the clients I direct to measure sales activity daily have even doubled their revenue in one year.

It forces everyone in the organization to sell as a team, to work the sales process as a team, to continually do all the activity that continuously drives the pipeline which, in essence, is the lifeline of the business.

Here is my point, if you are not driving your pipeline every day or least that activities that create a pipeline for your business, you are really just conducting a high priced hobby.

You are working in a window of denial that may hurt you (in six months or six years), but it will eventually hurt you. Even if you continue to create a profitable business that isn’t as big as your more “sales-minded” competition, what will happen is they have the opportunity to “buy” your advantage from you, they can buy your people, buy a competitive technology, buy a leapfrogging technology, and so on.

This is what people refer to when they talk about “sales fixing all problems.”  It is about mathematic ability for a company to make the expense of some kind of technical advantage less of an advantage by having more money in the bank.

Look and think of it this way, if you want to lose weight you measure it everyday. If you are saving money, you check your account every day.  Whatever you focus on grows, if you focus on sales, it will grow. You can measure daily, sell daily, and drive your activity daily.