What’s Today’s Challenge?
In just the last week we have encountered the following sales client challenges:
- How to find qualified, self-motivated sales staff?
- When to hire, who to hire?
- How to manage the post application process for internal candidates who applied for sales positions but did not get selected for the position?
- Who to send to a major international trade show?
- Do I hire a technical sales representative to take over part of my sales responsibilities or an executive assistant to leverage more time to sell?
- I don’t have enough sales horsepower but I have 200 qualified leads in a company whose average sales is 5mm/sale?
Talk about a divergent set of challenges. Yet this is not different that the week before or the week before that. Challenges abound, sometimes the answer is clear, and sometimes there are no right or wrong answers so careful testing must be done to uncover the answer. However, what is required for all of these challenges and many more is that wisdom, discretion, experience, sober second thought and accurate calculation is required to craft a meaningful response to all of the above challenges.
Every day we interact with Small to Medium Business who face the challenge of how to proceed…
Here are some of the higher level challenges we encounter:
- Not having a solid business strategy and from that a tactical plan to engage the strategy;
- A lack of strategic and/or tactical planning means you do not have a meaningful set of benchmarks to access challenges and/or opportunities as they occur;
- Not having a succession plan and the required personnel development plan that goes with it;
- Executives and senior managers who have no trusted Second In Command (2IC);
- Companies with high employee turnover and low employee retention;
- Companies who do not understand and invest in developing a culture that attracts highly qualified and self-motivated staff at levels and position in the company;
- Where did all our customers go?
- What happened to our gross margin?
- Not engaging in the proactive evolution of your business to remain competitive;
Challenges, improvement opportunities, risks and rewards abound.
To get more focused on charting the best path through them, let’s talk.
