How to create repeatable sales growth
“We have sales, but we just don’t have a repeatable, process driven way of getting more.”
It’s one of the most common things we hear from entrepreneurs and small business owners that have outgrown sales and marketing practices.
When you’re building your business, it’s not uncommon to do whatever you need to drive more revenue, including:
Relying exclusively on word of mouth to grow.
Dependence on a social media group or membership to grow.
Leveraging your personal or professional network as a pipeline.
You, the CEO, being the #1 salesperson.
The problem is, these types of tactics aren’t scalable. So, what got you “here,” won’t necessarily get you “there.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s actually good news.
Chances are you have a product or service that works well, people like, and are willing to pay for. That’s more than many business ventures can say for themselves.
“That’s great,” you say, “But how do I create - and capture - customer demand in a repeatable and sustainable way?”
Fundamentally, the lack of repeatable sales growth in your business can usually be traced back to the absence of a sales and marketing system, or what we call a Growth System™.
Every business is unique, but there are six elements required for every business to create sales, in a way that scales:
1. Justifying the sale with a unique selling proposition.
A unique selling proposition isn’t a list of features of your product or service. It’s a deep understanding of how your value proposition helps customers achieve their goals, and why you’re different from your competitors.
One exercise I like to do with clients is ask them to create a list of things they believe contribute to their USP. Then I ask them to scratch off any of the claims their competitors also make.
Inevitably, the “we have great customer service” or “the highest quality” claims get marked off the list, making way for the things that make your selling proposition truly unique.
What is the real benefit customers get from your offering? And what can you deliver that no one else can?
This is your USP, and it’s the foundation of your repeatable sales strategy.
2. Attracting prospects to your business in a repeatable way.
A common misconception with entrepreneurs is that repeatable sales is all about how you’re selling.
It’s not.
Once you’ve established your foundational USP, the next element in your Growth System™ is establishing marketing practices that are effective, scalable, and measurable.
When it comes to marketing, effective means one thing: Creating sales opportunities.
A great looking logo, a lot of likes on posts, thousands of followers, and tons of content mean nothing if they aren’t creating sales opportunities.
And if marketing’s job is to create sales opportunities, you’re going to have a hard time repeating sales success if you can’t repeat marketing success.
The measurability of marketing is often debated because you can’t always attribute sales to a single source.
As marketer Chris Walker often points out in his content, if a prospect sees your LinkedIn post, then Googles your business to visit your website, and downloads an ebook when they get to the site, then buys something, which one do you attribute the sale to? Social media, SEO, or the ebook?
The point of measurability is less about specifically attributing sales to a single source, and more about the effectiveness of the entire process. Designing a repeatable marketing strategy is a necessary part of creating repeatable sales.
3. Converting prospects into customers with sales processes.
When you’ve clarified your USP and implemented scalable marketing practices, it’s the role of sales to capture that demand and convert those prospects into customers.
There’s no “one size fits all” approach to sales, but one counterintuitive principle that applies to every scalable sales model is that they’re process driven, not results driven.
Not results driven? Isn’t sales all about results?
We obviously want results in sales, but results aren’t the only measure of success when the goal is to build a sales process that can be replicated. Annie Duke, the incredibly successful professional poker player, describes the importance of process over results best in her book, Thinking in Bets, with this question:
If you drive drunk and make it home safely without injuring anyone, was it a good decision?
With this, Duke aptly highlights that results can be misleading. In sales, we see this quite a bit with businesses that have relied on sales unicorns or practices that can't be replicated to drive growth.
Sure, the results are there, but if the process itself isn’t something you can, or want to, repeat, it’s not going to scale.
A repeatable sale process describes what each salesperson should do at each stage of the process and typically includes operations and messaging. You’ll know it’s repeatable when it’s documented in a sales playbook.
4. Keeping customers with systems that improve retention, repeat business, and referrals.
As I write in my ebook, Systematic Growth, any customer you keep is a customer you don’t have to replace.
It’s one thing to build a repeatable sales process, but the fastest way to accelerate growth - and profitability - is to pay careful attention to making the most of customers once you get them in the door.
If you have a product or service that actually meets or exceeds expectations, it’s usually easier to keep a customer, and to sell them more stuff, than it is to find a new one.
How do you know if you’re doing a good job in this area?
The first place to start is the data you can measure. How is your retention, repeat business, or net promoter score relative to competitors? This is a great indication of how well you are delivering on your USP.
The second place to look for information is the customer themselves. Are you routinely getting feedback from customers that leave, and actually listening to it?
Remember, any feedback you disregard may be the ammo a competitor or entrepreneur needs to create space between you and your customers.
The third consideration in this part of the Growth System™ is how often customers refer business to you. If no one is referring business to you, it may be because you aren’t delivering what you say you will. It may also be because you aren’t asking people to refer business to you. One simple way to help improve referrals is to ask for them.
5. Creating an environment in the business that retains good talent.
An overlooked part of driving repeatable, and sustainable, sales growth is organizational culture.
Business culture can be a nebulous concept. What exactly makes a great culture and what makes an unproductive one?
It’s tough to say with absolute certainty, but when it comes to identifying unhealthy cultures that inhibit your ability to consistently grow your business, I’ll draw on Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous phrase:
“I know it when I see it.”
High turnover, low effort, politicking, and shady practices are all things you’ll find in a dysfunctional professional environment that prevents the kind of sustainable sales growth you want.
While quantifying organizational culture can be difficult, there are some tools that help do this well, like Nasch (disclaimer: Nasch is an RJG partner). But you don’t need hard data to know whether you have an environment that promotes productivity, or suffocates it.
Is there more collaboration, or infighting? Is there more ownership, or finger pointing? Is there extra effort being invested, or the bare minimum?
Getting real about where your team stands in this area is critical for sustainability of the system.
6. Clearly defining the strategic direction you are going.
Everything is in place:
You have a USP.
You have repeatable marketing practices.
You have a customer-centric way of capturing demand with sales practices.
You have systems and processes to ensure you keep - and multiply - the customers you have.
And you’ve built an environment that makes sustaining this system realistic.
Now, does everyone on the team know exactly where you are headed?
As a mentor of mine pounded into my thinking early in my sales career:
Tactics follow strategy.
No matter what industry you’re in, or how well engineered your Growth System™ is, continuous improvement is a necessary part of maintaining performance.
Without a clear direction of where you are headed, continuous improvement is a slow, approval-based process that requires everyone on the team asking whether changes make sense or not.
You can eliminate that constraint, and accelerate the improvements being made in your organization, by clarifying exactly where everyone ought to be headed. That level of clarity empowers people to make decisions on the best way to get there.
Any one of these improvements that results from a clear vision and strategy is unlikely to stand out on its own, but the compounding effect of everyone in the organization making them on a consistent basis leads to exponential returns.
There you have it, the key elements of your Growth System™.
And the framework we use with clients to conduct sales audits and create repeatable growth strategies.
The level of difficulty in building a system for repeatable sales growth varies quite a bit, depending on how large your business is, how many of these elements already exist, and, of course, what your goals are.
If you’re willing to adopt a systems-based mindset, though, it is most certainly possible.
Want to start creating reliable sales growth in your small business?
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