Define and Record Your Sales Processes
One of our takeaways from the advisor meeting we had at the end of October was to simply record and define our business processes – not only the normal processes, we needed to record our successes and failures as they relate to SALES.
Sales is a process that can be proprietary, especially if you sell high ticket items. The way you get to the decision maker, the techniques you use to help the decision maker look good, feel good, and ultimately purchase from you versus your competitors is going to be different every time. When you start recording your successes and failures, you begin to see a pattern that will be unique to your company and your business processes as a whole – it will be a company secret and an asset to your organization.
One way to ensure more successes than failures is to hire an excellent salesperson that has a lot of experience – not so much in your field, but with the decision makers you are trying to target. QualityScores will want to bring in an enterprise sales expert at some point in the near future to consult with us on what to do, say, and record when entering a sales funnel or process with future clients. This expert can help navigate or understand what their concerns are, which hurdles we should jump through and which negotiation tactics we should use.
Ultimately, every business has to be a sales business so it is very important to define and record your sales processes.
How This Relates To Pay Per Click Advertising
The web sales process is unique compared to a face to face sale. People behave differently on the web, they search for different terms, and their overall attitude is typically not what it would be in person.
When you are testing a sales funnel, or a click funnel, it is important to record every move you make because a single word can make a difference.
Ads and keywords can have different buying behaviors attached to them – this is where hiring an expert might make sense! You wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on pay per click advertising to “find” the keywords that could potentially convert into sales – you want to start out ahead of the game. Hire an expert that understands or can build a good understanding of the psychology of your market, which terms they are searching for, which ones would be more likely to turn into a transaction, etc.
If your expert is really good, they will not only offer to help with your pay per click ads – they will also offer to help with your website sales process. Is your website conducive to selling or does it just look pretty? <—- That is a good question for another post some day. 
It is important to define and record your WEB sales process because that can be a secret weapon that will put a barrier between you and your competitors – even if that barrier is simply outsourcing this function to the experts!
Read MoreHow Many Business Advisors Do You Have?
After we hit a nice little tipping point earlier this year, I realized that I needed to follow the sage advice that almost any business book says is a requirement to succeed: organize a panel of advisors and meet regularly to draw upon their experience in navigating through the regular cycles of a young business.
Our first meeting was yesterday, October 31, and it was a blast. Advisors are important, they opened up our eyes to so many organization methods, process documentation, and branding ideas that it will take us two or three months to catch up with what they gave us!
Here are the characteristics of our Board of Advisors (4 of them):
Two Master Degrees – one in Computer Technology and another in Business Administration. He is building a small office for a dashboard visualization software company and he teaches at a local college. Not only does he have two awesome degrees for our industry and the position we’re in – he has a technological background and a deep understanding of high tech business.
One individual has a degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He works with major brands and is extremely successful at taking start up companies to major results with branding by design. He also has a great business mind because his branding business has an office in Rexburg, near our location, and an office in Seattle. They are constantly growing and learning from their growth spurts. We felt this individual was very close to where we are or where we are going and we could use some fresh insight from his experiences in addition to drawing upon his knowledge and expertise with branding/marketing.
A Finance MBA with a Bachelor Degree in Asian Studies make for a very unique, powerful combination in this advisor who has over 10 years of high-tech venture capital and finance experience. If that doesn’t say enough, I don’t know what else to say that would convince you this individual knows what he is doing and what he is talking about.
Finally, last but not least, we introduce our marketing guru – a man with 20+ years of high-tech marketing experience and the education to back it up. He has worked with several top notch tech companies that eventually sold for millions or continue to grow at a very rapid, manageable rate.
We will share the advice we received from them over the next few days.
I have to admit that it feels great to have such a powerful, diverse team that is so gracious and willing to help a young business succeed!
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