sales roundtable 55


“The market is now more open with alternative business structures (ABSs) involved too.”


Tatham: “Surely, the way to win a tender is to ‘write it with the customer’ in the first place.”


Sikorski agreed, highlighting that the key to good tendering was to truly understand the potential customer’s needs. Generally, such needs were based on reducing time and costs, improving efficiency, sales and profits, and “often forgotten, but very important today” adding value to the customer’s brand.


Analysis to support sales growth . . .


Sikorksi stated that Henley Business School taught eight essential selling skills, within a nine-step successful selling process, including the six important sales metrics. “Because what you measure is what you manage, and what you manage is what you grow.”


Tatham agreed that good measurement reporting could drive sales growth: “We use the line ‘Ensure that we can inspect what we expect’. It does help boost salesteam confidence to know that we can measure what we ask them to do.”


GCS has also recently opened a new office in New York, upgraded its systems and invested in training in order to boost future sales growth ambitions. “On the ground” support for clients was also an important consideration within sales growth strategy, Bloxham added.


. . . and a lack of analysis?


Murray queried if anyone analysed their market competition. Tatham: “Not really, we just beat them.”


Lane: “Whilst we keep an eye on the competition, we don't agonize over how they go to market, we just aim to be the best that we can be.”


Rolfe said Ridgeway simply accepted “… there are no bad cars out there any more.” However, at new car launches, Ridgeway did invite its sales executives to drive market competitor cars and rate them against the Ridgeway proposition.


Hicks: “Where you have product or service innovation, market supremacy rarely lasts long and others catch up and innovate mimicking market leaders.”


Sikorski: “Businesses need to understand that today you may have an advantage, but it can be gone in a heartbeat because there are always followers, imitators and innovators that will catch up and leapfrog and offer improved value propositions.”


Lane: “The only true competitive advantage today is the ability to change and adapt within the market.” Being able to predict change through KPI measurement and analysis is the key to long-term success and staying ahead of the competition.


Diane Richards


Hicks highlighted the importance of understanding the costs of incremental sales growth. “The cost of client recruitment in one channel can be small, but that client life expectancy might be equally small; the cost of recruitment in another form could be very high but the revenue generation through the lifecycle will be materially more.”


Sikorski: “The cost of acquiring customers might be colossal, but if the lifetime value of that customer is 10 times the cost, then the initial outlay can become irrelevant. There is too much focus on cost of acquiring and not enough determining the lifetime value of a customer”


Bloxham noted that the TV250 position of GCS had fallen this year despite the company having its best year ever in sales (net fee income). Company turnover (the TV250 listing criteria) had fallen, he explained, because more candidates had been placed in permanent positions. “It’s a decision that every company faces. Are you growing good sales for your type of business?”


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – NOVEMBER 2015


Stamatis: “Though we may be interested in what our competitors are doing, what surprises me is how little interest there often is in understanding what our clients really think of us.” Working in a customer information vacuum was no route to success.


Tick-box feedback forms and questionnaires didn’t really “engage with the client and provide the ability to design your business to do what your client wants.” Creating a relationship whereby clients give honest and accurate feedback was the ideal.


Tatham said Westcoast did exactly that – “We


Aki Stamatis


do speak to our customers about what we are doing and how we can respond better to them to gain more business.”


Bloxham stressed the importance of talking to the right people at different levels within the client’s organisation.


“Your customerbase is quite often your best sales force,” Lane commented. Happy customers, who are happy to promote your products and services, will speak to their peers, leading to referral work and beneficial reputational awareness within the market.


Sikorski: “The key thing is how to migrate the customer from suspect to prospect through to becoming loyal, because loyalty creates a lifetime customer. It’s about building fans and customers for life, not just transactional customers.” Referral marketing, product trialing, and customer advisory panels could all follow. Customer loyalty measurements such as Net Promoter Score and Customer Effort Score, are powerful metrics that provide significant insights and offer greater prediction of business success in growing sales and profitability, he added.


Creating and retaining customer loyalty was actually a company-wide task not just a sales objective, stressed Richards. “It’s vital that company operations throughout are on point all the time, doing an immaculate job for the customer. ‘All problems may be fixed by growing sales,’ but you have to support that statement in practice.”


Lane: “There is a counter argument to the saying, of course. Simply growing sales without profitability, or the right customers, or sales that detract from your brand value, and so on, can produce problems. Businesses need to align themselves with customers that share their values and represent what they stand for so you are not diluting the messages you send to both the market and your people.”


Stuart Rolfe


www.businessmag.co.uk Continued overleaf ...


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