A Little Known Secret to Growing Your Market Share in 2014
November 25th, 2013
Are you the undisputed industry leader in your market? Does your marketplace perceive your company as the safest, lowest-risk choice?
If so, you need not read further.
For those of you who do not happen to fit into this very elite group of companies, you are faced with a brutal reality. You are an underdog. And as an underdog, your only path to consistent revenue and profit growth is to outsell everyone else.
“We almost won that sale” is much worse than it sounds. We’re not dealing with horseshoes or hand grenades here. In sales, “almost” simply doesn’t cut it.
Second place is the worst place to be. In fact, when it comes to selling, “almost winning” usually costs far more than getting blown out of the water. Second place always costs more than not being considered at all. Fighting hard until the end of a sale can cost a fortune in time, travel, proposals, resources, energy, and profit. In just about every selling situation, it is more profitable not to play at all than to play and lose.
In every industry, only one company is the market leader. The rest of them are underdogs. If you’re still reading, odds are high that your company may be one of them.
If your company is not outselling its competitors and consistently exceeding its sales goals, it is likely that the weak performance stems from deficits in one or more of the following areas:
- Salesperson Selection/Hiring
- Ineffective On-boarding
- Selling Skills
- Lack of Accountability
- An Entitlement Mentality
- Lack of Motivation
- Ineffective (or non-existent) Training and Development
- Ineffective (or non-existent) Sales and Sales Management Processes
Most of these issues point to a general lack of effective Sales Management, an epidemic problem among private businesses.
The results of this epidemic are staggering and very visible. 75% of private business owners rank their organization’s overall selling effectiveness somewhere between “Poor” and “Average”. Not a very high bar. This is great news for any business owner seeking to grow revenues and profit. You may be wondering: “what is so great about that?”
Here’s your answer. In most cases, an “Above Average” sales effort will allow your company to win an abundance of sales contests and gain significant market share over your self-proclaimed mediocre sales competitors. Although it would be fabulous to have an amazing sales team, it is not necessary to win the majority of cases.
In less than one year, an effective sales manager (or the implementation of an effective sales management function) can quickly change everything. Effective sales management, a function that deals with the bulleted items above, will have the single greatest impact on your market share, growth, and profit.
As business owners, it is up to us to decide exactly how to spend our very precious time, money and resources. It doesn’t matter if your company has one salesperson or a thousand salespeople. If you are serious about growing your business in 2014, there is no better place to invest resources than in the area of effective sales management.
Copyright © Joe Zente 2013. All Rights Reserved.
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