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:

1. Know who buys from you and why.
2. Know the process that was followed to turn people from cold prospect to passionate client.
3. Know what your best clients value and what they continue to expect and look for.
4. Know where other businesses like your best clients are.
5. Know how to connect into that market or group.
6. Know what tools, tactics, and resources are necessary to generate information and awareness with those future clients.
7. Know how to communicate in a consistent manner with your market using the language of the lessons of your successful experiences.
8. Know your clients’ story – what they loved, why they value your business, why they value the relationship.
9. Know how to share your clients’ story with others.
10. Know how to integrate your functional activities of sales and marketing into a collaborative, supportive process.
11. Know how to continually measure and track your success.
12. Know how to modify your strategy to reflect new and valid knowledge.
13. 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.

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Let’s read the tea leaves for a moment:  the stock market is in chaos, the economy has not really produced any real, new jobs, increases global economic tension, large corporations continue to hoard cash at record levels, and government leaders firmly divided to the point of fighting instead of building consensus.  In an examination of these trends, I clearly foresee another dip in the economy in over the next twelve months.

Though I am not an economist or a financial expert, as a business growth strategist the current state of the economy concerns me.  That said, I am not going to be one to panic, roll up the carpet, plan for layoffs and cutbacks, and look for the bottom to fall out.  The following is the cautious, yet practical advice from Micheal Alter in Inc Magazine recently:

I advise small business owners to plan for an economy driving in reverse, most likely longer than we’d all like. Hire only when absolutely necessary. Invest cautiously. And curtail spending…at least until the indicators point you act otherwise. While this perpetuates a cycle of a slow-to-recover economy, surviving this economy with healthy revenues is your number one goal.

I would like to shift your pragmatic mindset from “survival” to opportunity.  From a revenue and growth perspective, here is what I read and believe your future strategy needs to be:

1. Plan: Anticipate the challenges a down economy will have present to your best clients.  Make a list of the impact, the behaviors, and the obstacles a downturn will have on them.
2. Identify: Strategize how your experience, capabilities, and team can coordinate with them to collectively sustain your respective businesses through an economic upheaval.
3. Communicate: Take a leadership role in engaging them in conversations to explore new strategies, market approaches, and programs that you can jointly benefit from in this unsettling time.
4. Collaborate: Engage in a dialogue around innovation and teamwork. These are your best clients.  Your business is dependent upon their success.  Hence, your existence is dependent upon helping them discover ways to team up and be successful.  Bring them into the strategic tent and collectively solve the impending challenges you both face.
5. Commit: Instead of thinking ahead to layoffs, cutbacks, and reductions, allocate your best players to this program.  After all, they are and it is, your future.

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While I have been actively blogging for the better part of four years, I slowed down on my content development because I was working on fine tuning my blog strategy.  With two blog sites, I had the desire to consolidate them ino one. Every time I thought about the task, I had a great deal giving one of them up.  The decision I came to regarding these blogs is that I will keep them both.  What I need to do is have a better definition and voice for each of these blogs.  That is what I have done. 

The purpose of this post is to introduce the purpose and intent of each blog site; and, allow you to decide which provides you the most interesting source of information and interaction.  Of course, I would be thrilled if you followed and were engaged in both.  However, as good as my content is in providing insight, information, and initiating thought, even I know you probably have a limited amount of free reading and interaction time. 

SalesCooke:  The original blog in my “empire.”  This blog features thoughts, ideas, concepts, strategies, and commentary on all things sales.  Topics range from sales strategy, sales training, sales tactics, sales concepts and sales behaviors.  I am a passionate advocate of relationship oriented, solutions based selling behaviors.  Sales Cooke brings these philosophies to life.  I will submitting a written post on a weekly basis.  I will also be providing links to a series of Podcasts that I have developed with a local sales superstar here in Phoenix, Chris Conrey. (Connect with SalesCooke)

SustainableRevenues: As passionate as I am about effective relationship development behaviors in sales, I am even more passionate about positioning organizations for sustainable growth.  All to often businesses over emphasize the importance of new customer sales as a key to building a business.  While this is and continues to be an integral component of business growth, real and sustainable growth occurs when a business leverages its relationships–team, customer, suppliers, ownership–in a strategically focused manner to retain and expand the ones it already has.  I have developed a formula that emphasizes revenue expansion with an organization commitment to growth; not a departmental mindset toward sales.  This weekly blog will focus on customer engagement, culture, communication, employee development and leadership strategies, behaviors and concepts that will put a business in an organizational growth program.  I will also introduce several experts as guest bloggers to contribute their powerful experiences and insights. (Connect with Sustainable Revenues)

Two blogs.  Two opportunities to engage and interact.  I look forward to your comments, feeback, ideas, and questions.

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Catching the Innovation Wave with SuRF from Dave Cooke on Vimeo.

Strategic Resource Group announces the rollout of it latest program focused on bringing sustainability to businesses known as the Sustainable Revenue Formula, or SuRF.  This introductory video from Founder and Chief Growth Officer, Dave Cooke highlights the overall vision of SuRF.  For more information on SuRF go to the new website: www.sustainablerevenues.com.

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When you sell on price, your customers buy on price.  Once you start down this nasty road it is hard to get off it.  The airline industry has put themselves in a monstrous hole because of it.  Now, without increasing fares, which they can’t bring themselves to do because they have taught us to be price sensitive to fares, they gouge customers with “optional” costs.  Where does it end?  It may end in the toilet as any stupid price based strategy does with Ireland’s RyanAir announcing a pee-premium on its shorter flights.

What happens when you lower your price?

1. It makes it very difficult to offer good service.  People start to look at price as the differentiator and expect your prices to be among the lowest.  There is little room in these diminished margins to pay for good service.

2. People accept poor service because they bought on what was offered–low price.  Hence, what had the potential to be a differentiator–good service–now is not valued and not affordable.

3. It is impossible to continue down the low price threshold.  Eventually, some aspects of service are required to support the product. However, no one values it because it is so poor, that you now need to treat service as extras and have people pay for these extras.

4. Unfortunately, these services are not that good so most people resent and avoid paying for them.  Hence, you cause more commotion with the charges for these services than you receive in the minimal revenue they generate.

5.  Eventually everything will become an extra and there is no real service, no real value and still no real profits.  All because you originally decided that you had to lower your prices to be competitive.

If you had taken the time to understand what people would value and pay for in the beginning and made sure those services were worth paying for, this whole silly price, service, extras fee structure would have been avoidable.  Frankly, it is still avoidable.  Unfortunately they aren’t asking me, because then they would have to admit they made a huge mistake years ago.  Too bad, we could have pleasant travel and profits and everyone would win.  Time to find some change to use the restroom.

Dave Cooke has recently launched his program the Sustainable Revenue Formula™ (SuRF), which provides businesses a comprehensive formula for effective and sustainable revenue growth.  If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the white paper, “Revolutionizing the Future for Today’s Business”, please contact me: dave@salescooke.com.

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In today’s economy there are three trends that influence revenue improvements for businesses: personalization, authenticity and community.   How effectively businesses recognize these shifts defines their ability to re-capture revenues and maintain customer relationships.  Businesses and individuals are no longer entering into relationships with businesses simply because of the business; they are scrutinizing and evaluating these relationships through their sense of some personal connection to the people or the community in that business.

This trend is a seismic shift resulting from both the economic meltdown, as everyone evaluated their business and buying relationships, and the influences associated with all the social media activities and informational resources.

What does this mean to your business?

Authenticity: Jargonistic, disconnected, jingoistic pitches do not resonate in today’s market.  People are looking to understand and relate to the realism of your business.  Southwest Airlines has brought the human element into their ad campaigns with flashing baggage handlers and community serviced oriented employees.  Nothing is more authentic than that.

Personalization:  Steven Jobs has always brought a personal component to the Apple brand.  However, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in sweaters instead of ties talking at college forums humanizes two of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people.  Customers are looking to engage in business relationships with the people in a business, not simply the logo or the name of a business.

Community: Apple and Mac have always done a great job of building a community around their customers.  There is a sense of membership, attachment, or participation for customers linked to these brands.  More and more people are looking for a sense of connection to the products and services they buy.  And they are the ones who can help build that community when they feel that connection.

Social media, technology, and the maturation of a market segment known as millennials are creating a whole new revenue generation.  Understanding these shifts and applying your strategies and tactics to respond to these shifts are critical.  Traditional, old, reliable, and historic sales and marketing methods will not work in this environment.   Make the shift today or your business will be behind the curve.

Dave Cooke has recently launched his program the Sustainable Revenue Formula™ (SuRF), which provides businesses a comprehensive formula for effective and sustainable revenue growth.  If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the white paper, “Revolutionizing the Future for Today’s Business”, please contact me: dave@salescooke.com.

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