Turn Your Tiny Business Into A Sales Machine

For a bunch of geeks, Black Chair has always been ok at selling. In years past, I sold more software in a year than many “professional” (dedicated-to and trained-for-the-role) software salespeople do, and it’s largely because I was the closest thing to a salesperson in the company — if I didn’t sell, we wouldn’t eat.(I think it’s also because I understood the product better than non-geek salespeople sometimes do, but that’s a different kettle of fish.)

However, we weren’t disciplined about our sales process back then. It wasn’t a consistent, repeatable process. Some months, we had more work than we knew what to do with. Other months were pretty dry. And the sales pipeline was very short — I was counting on word-of-mouth leads, and I had no reliable way of generating those by myself.

I’ve learned a lot about sales since then, both from reading (I can’t recommend this book enough) and from observing the sales process at multiple organizations I’ve worked with. We’re still in the process of implementing it at Black Chair, but it’s a system that I know works, even for the tiniest of companies. (It’s focused on businesses with an average sale price of more than $2,000, although it could be tweaked for others.) Here’s a summary:

1. Invest more in marketing than sales

Most small B2B companies unconsciously do the opposite. Marketing is often out-sourced, and it always feels like a big expense when you’re writing a fat cheque to the marketing agency for your new website, but think about the amount of time your organization spends selling. Finding leads, nurturing them, closing the sale, managing the relationship. Not to mention sales commissions! Most small businesses invest far more in sales than marketing, whereas if they do it properly a bias toward marketing investment will provide a far greater return overall.

2. Focus on long-lasting marketing activities

Don’t buy ads, unless you’re doing it for a very strategic reason. Instead, generate content. This canmean social media content, blog posts, podcasts, etc, but it also includes finding ways to have the local community paper write about you, or throwing an event that gets covered by an industry blog. The reason is because we want to create compound returns. Just as in personal finances, investment in business activites with compound returns is usually wiser than a one-time ad.

(There are exceptions, but they’re often related to this concept. For example, if you’re throwing an event, and you expect to reap long-term results if the event is successful, then by all means pay whatever it’s worth to advertise the event. Similarly, if you have a piece of content that you know drives sales particularly well, then it might make sense to have a paid promotion of that content if the margins justify the cost.)

This style of marketing is often referred to as “content marketing” or “inbound marketing”.

3. Collect an audience

You shouldn’t attempt to drive sales directly from the content generated in step #2. Instead, collect an audience. And, ideally, collect contact information (typically email addresses) for that audience. How to do this will depend largely on the content created in step #2; if you’d like to learn more about that you may want to visit this link.

4. Keep in touch

Once you have an audience, make sure they don’t forget about you! The only way to do this without being annoying is by providing them value — this can be as simple as sharing relevant links with your email list periodically. It’s possible to be much more strategic about this, but not necessary to start. The point is that by the time their circumstances place them in a buying position, your business should be top of mind.

5. Inbound sales

Steps 1–4 provide a framework for a system in which leads largely come to you (I would also augment this with some traditional prospecting, but that’s a topic for a different post). So now your sales process should be all about accommodating those leads when they call! And accommodation is really the key here — inbound sales work best with a collaborative, consultative approach rather than high-pressure tactics.