All sales are personal.
Whether you are selling widgets, services or ideas, people buy from people. The mechanism for purchase might be a highly impersonal Web site, but ultimately the customer is making the purchase based on the person whom they perceive to be selling it to them.
Perception is reality. Therefore, it is critical that your sales system — whether it relies entirely on in-person sales or online transactions — creates a sense of integrity and consistency.
This is true whether you are for-profit or non-profit. Whether the customer is making a purchase or offering a donation, the transaction relies upon their ability to trust you.
Sales is the culmination of the customer experience. It should be the goal of the marketing plan, which is based on a branding platform that is aligned with the overall strategic plan.
My approach to support your sales/fundraising is to ensure alignment at each of these levels.
And I do not stop at the sale: my goal is to turn your customers into your salesforce.
NOTE TO NONPROFITS: If you don’t think the word “customers” is appropriate for donors, you should prepare to lose your donors to organizations who do.
There are many elements to building this kind of sales plan. Here are some of the ways that I can help you:
- Sales Analysis — Reviewing your historical transactions to identify trends that can indicate both problems and opportunities. For example, reviewing your past five years of customers to determine retention rate and which types of customers are the most profitable. Also involves determining which customers are the most expensive to maintain — and you DO have some that are too expensive to keep.
- Customer Analysis — Interviewing past, current and potential customers to determine their needs/wants, the drivers behind their purchase decisions, etc. This empowers your salesforce with an understanding of what motivates your customers so that they can make the sales.
- Customer Identification — While maintaining current customers is far more cost-effective than creating new customers, you must find new markets in order to achieve growth. I can help you to determine new categories for expansions, new markets to tap and specific customers to target.
- Optimizing Sales Process — Analyzing the variety of transactions in your business to ensure that you have minimized the barriers to entry for your customers, and not created unnecessary hurdles for them to say “yes.” This can be as simple as looking at how many clicks it takes to make a purchase on your site to analyzing how customers interact with your salesforce. This will ensure that once your marketing plan brings the customer in the door, your sales process doesn’t push them back out.
- Proposal Development — Reviewing your recent proposals to develop a stronger template that can make future proposal development faster and more effective. Includes developing a comprehensive set of documents that can be pieced together rapidly with minimal customization, allowing your salesforce to focus their time on interacting with the customer rather than sitting behind their desk working on a proposal.
- Presentation Development — Every business makes presentations. Whether you are raising venture capital from angel investors or selling hamburgers to the general public, you have a salesforce that is making a presentation. I can work with your team to refine the language they use, the materials they provide and the experience that they offer to your potential customers.
I am not interested in being your salesperson. I want to equip your sales team to succeed, and to inspire them to turn your customers into your evangelists, ambassadors and salesforce. Creating ecstatically happy customers is the best way to build a referral system, which is infinitely more effective than the most expensive advertising campaign you can afford.
