Systematic Growth (or, Are You Still Beating Your Sales Team?)

Written by Bill Thursday, 03 June 2010 14:29

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Perhaps the delusion that most easily slips into our thinking is that growing the business is, at the end of the day, primarily a responsibility of the sales team. After all, if last quarter’s top line goals weren’t met the obvious reason is the sales team didn’t come through, right? And the solution is more highly-energized people, knocking on more doors, delivering more proposals, and following up more often.

Well, of course there’s a certain truth to that, but if it is adopted as a growth strategy you will quickly exhaust its ROI potential.

In other words, scaling up your revenues by scaling up numbers of sales people and the hours they work should only be attempted if there is a lot of untapped demand for your products. Otherwise, the diminishing returns present a no-win situation to your sales team, eventually pushing it to collapse.

One thing I’ve learned for certain:  in technology B2B companies good sales people usually have at least one standing offer to come work at someone else’s company.  A poor growth strategy is the quickest way to get them to make the jump.

A growth strategy must install the ROI headroom your sales team can grow in to. It must scale up your revenue potential without a corresponding scale up in people and expense.

And one of the best ways to do that is with highly energized marketing systems – systems that use automated methods to knock on more doors, find better targeted prospects, deliver better targeted proposals, and follow up more consistently. That, in a nutshell, is where Internet Marketing systems excel.

Internet Marketing systems can be a Growth Engine, creating untapped demand for your products. Good sales people can close more deals more often when the leads they pursue are targeted prospects that already know your company, are favorably inclined toward your solutions, and are ready to buy your products. Ideally, prospects reach out to you just as often as you reach out to them.

Do you need systematic growth? Do you have a Growth Engine?