Podcast Episode

Transcript:  

Hello and welcome to the sales Show. I'm Maree Kirkpatrick, your sales and business strategist. I'm a mum, a wife, and a multi-business owner myself. With over 15 years experience in sales and business, I have worked with startups all the way through to multimillion dollar. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I love helping service-based businesses make an income as well as an impact. Let's jump into talking about all things sales and business.

 Hello and welcome to the sales Show. I'm Marie Kirkpatrick, your sales and business strategist. I'm a mom, a wife, and a multi-business owner myself. With over 15 years experience in sales and business, I have worked with startups all the way through to multimillion dollar. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I love helping service-based businesses make an income as well as an impact. Let's jump into talking about all things sales and business.

Welcome to today's episode of The Sales Show. I'm so excited you're here! Today we are talking about why sales is so important.
Now, this may seem like a pretty basic question or something that you go, oh, dah. Of course sales is important, but I wanna get in a little bit deeper. When you first start out in a business or a job and you think, man, I just need to do this one thing to get myself across the line. And so when it comes to business, a lot of the time it's like, how do I make that first sale?

How do I get that flow going and everything happening so that the cash is coming in. Now, if we look at sales from a technical definition point of view, the term sales refers to all activities involved in selling a product or service to a consumer or to a business.

But in reality, it is so much more than.

It's the lifeline of your business. It's about creating products and services that are solving your clients' problems and challenges. Otherwise, there is no sales. Sales is an absolute integral part of any business or any successful business. There's plenty of businesses out there that aren't successful, and a lot of the time, the reason why they're not successful is because they're not making sales.

And so without sales, there would be no income. Sales drives revenue and helps businesses grow and succeed, not just in the short term but in the long term as well. It provides cash for you to grow your business. It provides cash for you to expand, to outsource things. If you're a one person or two person show, or if you just feel like you need to bring in more team members.

Sales is the answer to a lot of those challenges. They are a crucial role in understanding more about not just your customers, but about your business as well. I've seen a lot of businesses that will say to me, we're really clear on who we serve, how we serve them and where our target market is, what they need from us and how we engage with them.

Fantastic. How are your sales going? How's your conversion going? And if they struggle with sales, the answer for me is pretty clear. They're either not clear on exactly what they offer, or they're not clear on exactly what their client's needs and wants are and how they actually need to deliver them to their customer or client.

I have worked with a lot of businesses over the past eight years in my consulting firm from startups all the way through to multimillion dollar companies. When I first started working with multimillion dollar companies, I assumed that they would have a lot of their sales stuff nailed and it would just be more tweaking and optimizing and things like that.

But what I actually found was that a lot of larger companies focus a lot on marketing, which is fantastic, but the marketing and the sales aren't necessarily talking to each other. Sales and marketing needs to go hand in hand. It's not marketing versus sales. It's marketing before sales. It's how do we generate these sales from the marketing and energy that we are putting out there.

So if you are a business owner and you are spending money on Facebook ads or you are doing Google ads, or you are spending time and energy on or even money on social media, content creation, webinars, Newsletters. It needs to link in with sales. So I have this debate with people regularly, and it's a bit like the chicken or the egg situation, right?

What needs to come first? Is it sales or is it marketing? And for me, and I may be a little bit biased being a sales and business strategist, but for me it always comes back down to the sales because if I can sell one thing to one person. Then I have proof of concept. I know that what I am selling is working.

It's just a matter of tweaking it, optimising it, and how do I get more of them? How do I get more of those sales coming in? When I first started my business, I never looked at things like a website, a logo, branding colors, photos, and, and to be honest, I only got professional photos done two years ago because it was something that wasn't as important to me.
Will this drive my sales further? Will I get a return on investment on it? I'm not really sure. So for me it was, let's just focus on sales. Surprise, surprise, right? The sales chick focuses on sales . But everything else could come later. If I had cash coming through the door and I was generating profit and things like that, then we are good to go.

It's so important for you to understand the role of sales within your business, but also to spend some time and energy focusing on sales because there's not many people that sit down and go, okay, cool. During my week, what is going to be sales generating activity. And yes, that may be marketing, that is one aspect of the sale.

However, there are a whole heap of steps that come into a sales process. What I've actually done is put together a download for at mareekirkpatrick.com that will allow you to have a look at the seven steps that I recommend for a more successful sale within your business. Go and check that out.

It'll outline what those seven steps look like, but today I also want you to understand why it is so important and why you need to focus on sales to have long-term success within your business now. Sales has changed over the years, right? We don't sell the same way that we did 15 years ago, 10 years ago, or even five years ago even.

Sales has changed even since COVID happened. And it was funny, a lot of businesses went Into survival mode when it came to Covid. But some of the best companies that thrived were the ones that turned around and said, what do I need to do to make more sales? So my business went absolutely through the roof during Covid because I think a lot of people realise that they can't just keep winging sales.

Consumers are a lot more savvy than what they used to be. There's a lot more information, there's a lot more free things out there. So for people to purchase you need to be really clear on how you can help and how you actually serve people better than any of your competitors. The best way to understand that is to understand what are the challenges or needs of your clients and customers during Covid? If we used to go back to the Covid stage for a minute. I don't know if we're still in it. I think we potentially still are. And even when I went to Parliament House I met with some of the politicians for small business month. We sat talking about, what's happened with small businesses over the past couple of years and what that looks like moving forward. Some people will say that small businesses haven't even hit that hard part yet. Whether it's from staff challenges or from cash flow and expenses and everything rising.

For me, I think it's more about looking at who stands out more. People are still buying, people are still spending money. It's just about being clear on what it is that your clients and customers needs and wants are, how you deliver it, how you connect with them, and how you really build that trust, that knowledge, and give them what they need rather than what you think that they need.

I think that that's where a lot of businesses can potentially go wrong if they,  or if you keep, selling the same way that I was taught to sell, years ago. I don't think I would be successful in what I do anymore. You need to move with the times. You need to understand, that consumer behaviors and, and the way that they buy and habits and things like that have changed.

If you're not focusing on your sales, then that can potentially be missed. So make sure that you're keeping an eye on what is happening with your sales. I've had clients that have been in business for years and years, and what they've found is that they have had great sales months and then they've had low sales months.

It's not a matter that they have changed much, what they're doing much in between those months. But it's also about looking at what is generating the sales. How long does it take to make a sale, can also be big factor when it comes to, to the importance of sales and why companies can struggle with.

How do we shorten that sales cycle? How do we get people and our customers to know exactly what we do, understand that we are the best solution for them, and make that decision quickly and effectively in a really great timeframe instead of it stretching out two or three months at a time if it doesn't need to.

So when I was chatting to this amazing client, she had clients coming and she was making money, not as much money as she wanted. She felt like she had to work really hard for her money, which is an interesting money belief and all that sort of stuff. But that's a conversation for another time.

It's also about what could we do to make her sales more effective and efficient so that it wasn't high highs and then low. So once we had a chat and uncovered the challenges and I understood more about her business, I identified that her biggest challenge wasn't in marketing. It wasn't in product delivery or service delivery, but it was in her sales.

There'd be a lot of backwards and forwards between clients, lots of emails, lots of phone calls that just took up a lot of time and energy for her and her team, and when we actually looked at it, it was like, what do we need to do to sharpen things? Maybe sometimes she will present one solution and the client will come back and go, yeah, that sounds great, but can we change this? Or can we work it within this budget? Or, I'm only looking to spend this much money. Is there something we can tweak in that? And all of that takes time and energy, but that also in business equals money. Time is money. We really streamline her sales. . And once we did that, things became so much more efficient.

She had so much more energy. She had more time to take on more clients and to spend time growing her business because she had really sat down and looked at her sales. Her efficiency of sales, her conversion rates, the time or the the length of cycle that it took someone to come on board and things like that.

So make sure when it comes to your sales that you are really addressing what's working, what's not working. You don't need to throw spaghetti at a wall. There are things that you can do to really make sure that your sales is efficient and effective and that every single person within your company and your business is a money generating person.

If they need to be or if they come across customers and they're giving that experience and things like that. So if you wanna jump in and have a look at the download that I have created for you, the Seven Steps to a More Successful Sale it is all there for you. Just remember that you need to focus on your sales. Remember that it is the lifeline of your business. It is so important for any business, whether you are a not-for-profit, whether you are a multimillion dollar business, whether you are a startup, you should be focusing on sales and 80% of your time should be spent on sales generating activities or money generating activities so that you're bringing in profit and there is long-term success in your business. Focus on your sales, figure out how you can make more income and more impact by having a great sales process within your business.

That is all from me today. I look forward to chatting to you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Sales Show.

I am absolutely looking forward to sharing more about sales and business throughout this podcast journey and on the sales show. If you've got any questions or you'd love to reach out, please contact me, [email protected]. 

Please share it on social media for your friends to see and make sure you tag me @MareeKirkpatrick so I can personally say thank you. If you would like to show me some love, leave me a review on Apple Podcast.

If you would like to work with me further or see any of the free resources mentioned on today's show, they can be found at www.mareekirkpatrick.com. I truly hope this podcast provides useful information and so much value to you so that you can build a business with impact and income.