How to double your sales

How do you get an Elephant into a refrigerator?

Simple. Open the refrigerator door, put the Elephant in and close the door.

How do you double your sales?

It might feel similarly tricky. Is it even possible? Where would you start?
Today, I’d like to show you it’s not only possibly but actually quite achievable and straightforward.

The biggest problem why improving sales is difficult is because for many companies sales is a black box. They feed money in (in form of marketing and advertising spend) and they get sales out but what happens inside is largely invisible. Yet it is exactly what happens inside that holds the key to a step change in sales results.

If we look inside the box, we can identify distinct steps of the sales process. The following table shows the individual steps, their inputs and outputs and underneath there’s a short explanation of each step.

1. Generating leads — spending money on marketing, advertising or lists to generate leads
2. Qualifying leads — evaluating whether a lead is a suitable lead for the company (MQL = marketing qualified lead)
3. Nurturing leads — educating and nurturing prospects to warm them before sales team approaches them (SQL = sales qualified lead)
4. Selling — turning sales qualified leads into customers
5. Upserving a customer — increasing a value from a given customer, this could involve upselling, cross selling, account management (extending the time a customer keeps buying from us) and getting referrals from our customers

All these steps are nicely linked together — one follows the other and they — combine to an overall revenue. Let’s assume the following example.

If we spend let’s say £100,000 and generate 1,000 leads from that, 10% of which get marketing qualified, 30% of those then get sales qualified and 30% of those purchase at a customer lifetime value (CLTV) of £25,000. Then the overall Revenue would be a multiplication of the individual steps: 1,000 x 10% x 30% x 30% x £25,000 = £225,000.

Now, what would happen if we improved each of the steps by 15%? Starting with reducing the cost per lead, all the conversion rates and the customer lifetime value?

This is what would happen (left side is the original situation, the right hand side is the improved one):

Because the steps multiply, the effect of the improvements compounds. Across the five steps a 15% increase translates into more than 100% increase of the overall sales productivity. You’ve just doubled your sales.

The secret to doubling sales is to break down the process into its individual steps and focusing on improving each step.

But BEWARE!!!

There is a trap here — a very common mistake companies make when they try to implement this approach which instead of improving the productivity makes it much worse.

It’s so important that I’m dedicating a whole article to it. I will post it tomorrow so please read it before you proceed with your sales transformation initiative!

PS: By the way do you know how you get a Giraffe into the refrigerator?

Now that you know how to get an Elephant there, it’s much simple, right?

1. Open the refrigerator door
2. Remove the Elephant
3. Put the Giraffe into the refrigerator
4. Close the door

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