In a small company sales and marketing are two sides of a similar coin, in order to get in front of people you need to spend time and money, the cycle starts with marketing to get a front of mind perception of the business’s offering, leading to a conversation to sell products to the prospective client.

A popular way of summarising the sales cycle is derived from Pareto’s principle or that of the “80 – 20 rule”, where in sales 80% of the sales come from 20% of your clients.

If this principle is evaluated you can derive the thought. Look after the clients you have and grow them into great clients, while evaluating very carefully the time you spend persuading the tire kickers. Inevitably a customer who takes a lot of convincing to use your company will become the companies biggest critic when using the services.

For example there is often a gap of understanding between what the sales staff are offering the client and what the client requires, here the salesperson needs to evaluate how close the current over all core business workflow is to the desired outcome. Which on an extreme can become a question of how much capital is required to change the companies existing business practices?

On a simplistic scale the closer the new prospect is to buying a ready made of the shelf product the more time and money should be spent in achieving the sale.

So where does strategic change occur if you don’t follow your customer’s requests?

The strategy is exactly that, it’s a long term view of a business, and how it changes should be planned out and and discussed. Where 80% of the business should remain focused on it’s core, while the innovation should only ever be 20%. Where focus here is the keyword. Follow One Course Until Success.

Without a strong sales pipeline the business can starve of the companies most important commodity cash!

So from the 80/20 principle where would be the best place to go and get more sales, finding  a new partner who could become part of the 80% of non productive clients. Or should you go back to the existing clients, work out their needs and then super serve them in their needs?

Have you been able to increase your sales by asking your current customers what they want more of?

Is only ever going to be worthwhile if there is a clear way of achieving an online sale 24/7 365 days a year. If you’re spending your time driving traffic to a website that doesn’t sell or as a minimum doesn’t ask for an e-mail address you may as well have gone back to the future to 1992 when the internet was starting as an altruistic online give away.

In other real world terms, you may be spending money taking people out for coffee and lunches, and at then end of the day you may wondering when will this or that prospect come to the front door with a job?

Or you could be spending similar money using paid adverts to drive traffic to a website that provides invaluable information and most importantly sells your product without further human interaction.

The basics of a website are;

• Purchasing the website name, Domain name.
• Set up a WordPress website hosted by a shared hosting website provider.
• Subscribe to an e-mail subscription service to collect e-mail addresses and act as the e-mail forwarder for mass marketing e-mails. (creating an automated e-mail pipeline so no matter when a customer finds you, they’ll always receive a warm welcome and a set of informative e-mails on services and products and potential discounts.)
• Add a sales cart plug-in on the WordPress site, that will be the money engine an online shop, explaining the services and products, this is where you can become creative with package deals and special offers.

Finally when this package is up and running costing from $20 a month, you can use social media and paid advertising to drive traffic to your website.

So how do you measure success,when you’ve got a shopping cart on your website?It’s easy. If there is more business coming in than you’re paying for the hosted website and all it’s plugin’s. Then your in profit.

Or going back to the coffee house you could reduce the bar bill by two client drinks and the online shop will be a self financing selling machine.

What’s more don’t be surprised if the phone stops ringing and the enquires e-mails go quiet, it will all go to prove that your better serving your client!