Olympic Selling Strategies

Olympics fever is here and my seven-year old daughter has decided she would like to be an Olympic gymnast.  As I started to explain the intense effort over multiple years, long hours of training, highly-regimented diet (i.e. no sweets) they have to endure, she listened politely, told me that she would do an extra hour of gymnastics on Saturdays and then ran off to happily draw a picture of herself and a gold medal.

Many companies take a similar attitude towards growing their export sales.  They dream of glory, put a little extra effort into sales (attend a conference or exhibition, send some mailshots, go on a trade mission, sign up a couple of partners) and then draw up beautiful spread-sheets showing all the extra sales they expect to reap.   If only it was that easy.

Winning consistently at sales requires similar dedication to winning at sports.  

First, you need to understand and research your chosen export markets before you set your targets.  Do I have the talent and when/where - given the competition and my capabilities - can I maximise my opportunity for winning (“the goal”)? 

Then, you need to create a strategy for achieving your goals (“the game plan”), structure your organisation to win those sales (“the training”) and, finally, you need to execute to win (“the medals”).  And this execution needs to be consistent and persistent – you don’t win with an odd bit of effort here and there.   

As my young daughter will no doubt find out over time, a little bit of extra gymnastics effort is never going to yield Olympic glory.   Don’t make the same mistake with your sales plans – either expanding here or abroad – or you’ll just waste your time (and money).

Geraldine Fusciardi

www.strategy-structure-sales.com

Ideas for Selling Northern Ireland

Now, understand that I don’t mean to sell all six counties – I mean, who would buy them?  Only the Russians, the Arabs and the Chinese have any money these days and there’s not enough bling, natural resources (apart from beauty) or even, sadly, big industry to interest any of them in our little part of the world.    No, what I mean, is selling our products and services with a specific focus on our knowledge industry.    I was recently at IdeaFest at the NISP where about 80 of us were exploring ideas to make NI a start-up powerhouse for science and tech entrepreneurs.  Check out http://www.nisp.co.uk/?p=1913 for an overview.

Here are just some of the sales ideas that we discussed:

1.       The brightest and best need to be attracted into the knowledge economy as both entrepreneurs and professional sales people – we need to change the cultural middle-class focus from valuing doctors/dentists/lawyers above all others and get them to value careers in the job-creating knowledge sector.

2.       Put the market back into research on a regular global basis.  Research should not just be product-led (nor single-company driven).  We need to actively encourage ideas/innovation in market areas that have true global growth potential.  The only way we will know which areas is through regular Market Research on tracking trends around the world and actively encouraging entrepreneurs to develop ideas to meet the fastest growing opportunities (perhaps triggering “second-mover advantage” which many times can be better than “first mover advantage”). 

3.       Everyone needs to sell but not everyone can sell.  Let’s admit this.  Too often entrepreneurs attend a 3-5 day sales course and then everyone assumes (including themselves) they can now sell – not only locally but around the globe.  Would you employ someone to code for you on the basis of a one-week training course?

4.       Establish a Sales Academy to properly embed sales psychology, tools and processes, build exporting expertise, and raise the status of professional sales people. 

5.       Marketing and Sales needs to be more tightly linked in how companies operate and how they are supported – too often I see companies thinking and acting as if these are two entirely different activities (and the grants process only encourages such thinking).

6.       Clustering/Incubation needs to be supported at multiple locations across NI.  While Belfast should be the major hub, we need to encourage and support ideas throughout the north.

Finally, professional marketing and sales support should be on-going for high-growth companies – a combination of hands-on support, mentoring and structuring of their sales activity appropriately.   Once we have identified the high-growth companies then let’s ensure they are supported to achieve their potential.  Now, I would say that, wouldn’t I?  But let’s not forget that key measures of success for companies (and our economy) are sales and jobs, and the first drives the later!  

Geraldine Fusciardi

www.strategy-structure-sales.com

Marketing is a Process. And it leads to higher sales.

Many technology companies identify marketers as being primarily concerned with tactical communication (e.g. “we need to change our logo”). If you think of Marketing as a process however, the sequential approach of performing thorough market research, of calculating and identifying the most profitable markets and segments and of developing a concerted plan to involve all relevant colleagues to ‘go-to-market’, is a sound business practise that is designed to reduce risk and save time. 

Many leading tech companies I deal with in Ireland seem to forgo this process, while in fact unconsciously they compress all these steps into a few days, often leading to conclusions and decisions that waste the R&D budgets (new products launched despite limited market appeal) or prevent repeatable sales (a first and only customer represented “a big market”), hence increasing the cost of sale. This can happen in hyped-up markets where the technology and its derived products can be copied fast (ever heard of Microsoft Hohm, killed off even before its proper launch? or of Google Buzz, pushed to market and promptly pulled back, only to be re-launched worldwide as Google+ ? The difference is that no NI company has a cash pile of $30 bn. and can afford such costly mistakes. So every time I try to help a company get more sales out of marketing, I follow a rigorous marketing process.

Whereas twenty years ago, I would devise five-year Marketing Plans for Telecoms companies, the increasing pace of change over the past decade forced me to narrow down to three-year, then eventually to one-year plans. You may argue, “what’s the point of spending time to prepare a document with such a limited shelf-life?” Well, writing a plan actually kicks off the Marketing process, and helps you reflect and ask where you really want to lead your business. Once the basis has been set, it’s easier, more flexible and useful to transform that plan into a rolling basis one-year document (reviewed every three to six months). That is enough to get colleagues across the company aligned on positioning, message, sales pitch, benefits and the value proposition brought to your customers.  

Norbert Sagnard

www.sagnard.biz