The world of sales can be a crazy place; you need to develop a method to your madness to succeed. In this episode I discuss how to do that with my guest, Tom Libby. Tom is the founder & CEO of Smarketing Connect, Co-Founder of GrowthCraft, and a serial entrepreneur.
Why is it important to have a sales process? Because it’s repeatable, trainable, and scalable. With the right strategies in place, you could hire five salespeople tomorrow or you could replace five salespeople over the course of a year, and you wouldn’t be worried about changing the outcome of your revenue goals. You would be able to train people on your repeatable sales process. Even if you add more salespeople, it wouldn’t matter because your process remains the same regardless of how many salespeople you have.
What if you’re a solopreneur or two cofounders, how do you make your sales process scalable?
Tom says that there’s two separate questions here: 1) how do you make it scalable and, more importantly, 2) what if you don’t need it to be scalable? Do you really need a sales process if you’re going to be the only two people that sell for the company?
Tom would still venture to encourage you to create a sales process. What ends up happening with solopreneurs that have no interest in scaling up or hiring a bunch of salespeople, if you have a very clearly defined sales process it allows you to have more success. You will be able to take potential clients down a specific path and you will end up with truly ideal customers. You’ll avoid the problem of taking a customer that isn’t ideal and you end up trying to find a way to disconnect or you get fired. You can prevent that by having a structured good sales process in place that helps you qualify and disqualify people.
In this episode we also discuss:
- How to identify what makes a great customer.
- Why you need a sales process in place before hiring your first salesperson.
- The problems caused by not having a clear sales process and how to avoid them.
- Why, even as a solopreneur, you should be dissecting your sales process on a regular basis.
- How to make it easier to onboard clients.
- How to better predict and exceed your revenue goals.
…and more golden nuggets of advice!
You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”
About the Guest
Tom Libby is a seasoned Sales VP and Business Development Executive of 20+ years. Getting Sales & Marketing strategy right is part vocation, part mission. He has developed and helped improve companies management, leadership, and sales skills in diverse industries including startups, small companies up to and including fortune 500 companies.
Tom is also the founder & CEO of Smarketing Connect, Co-Founder of GrowthCraft, and entrepreneur. Tom spends most of his time connecting & collaborating with small businesses and startups to propel their companies forward through introductions to needed resources. The most important tool in his arsenal is collaboration. When people truly collaborate, the success is always greater than the sum of its parts.
