If you and I set up rival businesses … let’s say both running our own burger vans … and you could choose one competitive advantage … what would it be?
… A plush new van?
… Top quality meat?
… A recipe for the best relishes in town?
Go on. Any advantage you like – but you can choose only one.
This question was posed by the late Gary Halbert, one of the most celebrated business improvement specialists of the last hundred years (marketing was his area of expertise). He’d ask a whole roomful of students and list all their demands … then tell them why he’d win the burger war hands down.
Because his advantage would be unbeatable: He’d ask for … a starving crowd!
Think about that. You could have the world’s greatest burgers … but pitch up in the wrong place, like a vegetarian rally, and no-one’s buying.
On the flip side (no pun intended), the van selling average burgers in the right place … like a prime spot outside a football ground on match day … is going to rake it in.
That sounds obvious, I know, but dig deeper, because it’s a vital lesson in improving any aspect of your business performance – especially profitable sales growth that positively impacts on the bottom line.
It means, to succeed in growing sales, in this competitive, changing and post-pandemic world (now more than ever before), you need all your people to be the equivalent of a starving crowd, hungry for the changes in sales techniques that will improve the customer experience, sales, margin and loyalty.
You need to get all your sales people to totally “buy in” to the changes you want and need to make so they become ravenous, with passions ignited in a way that they’ll fall over themselves to give 100%, 100% of the time to play their full part in making change happen to achieve or exceed all your sales aspirations and objectives. Do that, and your sales performance and results will soar … and keep on soaring!
I’m sure you get the idea.
The only question is, how do you create that starving crowd mind-set with your sales team?
Try this. Get inside your people’s heads and ask yourself:
“Why are my people not as committed and dedicated as I am (or as they should be)? What motivational triggers am I missing that would energise them to be disciplined, creative, innovative and accept a deep level of personal responsibility and accountability to do the things that will smash our sales targets and objectives”
Answer that and you’ll have your starving crowd of sales people, right behind you … willing to devour any improvements and changes you, your competitors, the regulatory bodies and shareholders demand of them.
This concept is extremely powerful, because when you unleash and align the unused potential in everyone you create a high performance, unstoppable culture – one where every dial on the sales performance dashboard improves significantly.
We can help you do all this – through our tried and tested sales improvement programme. Check out the Shell case study to see the kind of results we produce when these barriers to performance improvements are removed.
Firstly, we’ll help you to get your “crowd” starving for the changes you want and need to make. Then we’ll show you how to amaze customers with levels of service that will lock them into you for ever and a day.
If all that sounds good to you, then contact any of the capable team here at Sewells to arrange a no obligation Sales Improvement Strategy Session.
