Building Your Sales and Marketing Infrastructure

The sales and marketing component of your business is responsible for finding clients, making sales, and generating revenue. It’s what drives cash flow.

Too many entrepreneurs are intimidated by the idea of selling and focus on this area of their business only because they have to. But when you’re still acting as the sole breadwinner for your company, it’s crucial to focus a great deal of your attention on generating profitable sales. If you don’t your new business won’t survive, let alone thrive. It’s only as your business grows that you can step back from this area of your business. To do that, it’s critical that you create a profitable selling system.

In the early stages, you need to make sure sales are happening. Often this means you’ll meet with clients to close deals. Later, your focus should shift to creating repeatable and scalable selling systems that aren’t dependent on key staff.

For example, imagine you have a software startup. A lot of your early effort will go toward landing joint venture relationships with more established players in your industry so you can market through their client relationships and then split the revenue. As your software company grows, you might instead focus on finding and hiring the talent to meet with new joint venture partners for you. Later, you’ll make sure your business is creating the systems that consistently find and hire new sales talent for your team.

Or imagine you have a contracting business. At first, you’ll meet with prospective clients to give them estimates and close sales. But this is only a temporary solution. To have a business that creates wealth for you, you need to build the system that generates those sales. This may mean creating advertising systems to generate leads, hiring and training new estimators to go out on sales calls, and at some point hiring on sales and marketing managers to take over leadership in this area.

Your selling systems include the following components:

• Marketing and lead-generation systems that consistently produce the lead volume your business needs to generate sales.
• Lead-conversion systems and a staff that continually converts leads into thrilled clients.
• Tracking and reporting systems that accurately measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts so you can optimize your selling systems over time.

Since many sales systems use live sales agents to close sales, your system might also need to include the processes you use to find, hire, and train new sales agents. Not to mention the sales management processes you develop to lead, motivate, and grow your sales team over time. The key is to build your sales systems to be independent of any key team members. In other words, it’s best to avoid relying too much on “superstars.” While it’s great to hire sales superstars, building a company that’s dependent on one person to generate sales is a bad business move.

Instead find ways to generate sales that aren’t dependent on your superstar. Or develop a dependable system for finding, hiring, and training sales superstars, in which case your business is not reliant on any one superstar, but on the system that finds or creates these superstars.

One of the companies I built was originally dependent on me and my partner to generate all the sales. And sell we did. The two of us generated several million dollars’ worth of sales each year. But it required long hours and worse, at least from my perspective, lots of travel. Back then I spent 10 days out of every month on the road selling and closing new business. I was making a lot of money, but it sure wasn’t the dream I had for myself.

We finally got smarter and created a sales team and systems that could close sales without us. We built up our online sales to half a million per year. We built a network of independent sales reps who sold another $2 million to $3 million a year. And we created a whole new selling channel with joint venture partners that generated several million dollars’ worth of annual sales for us, which we split fifty-fifty. All told it took us 36 months to build and optimize these selling systems. In the process we tripled our company’s sales volume and radically reduced its dependence on me and my partner to generate sales. Best of all I cut my travel time by more than 300 percent.

Creating a profitable business that can operate without you isn’t easy, but the rewards are huge.

David Finkel is the best-selling author of over 40 books and courses, including The Maui Millionaires for Business. He is a successful business owner who has bought, built, and sold several multimillion companies over the past 10 years. To learn more about his tools for business owners, visit him on the Web at mauimillionaires.com. {https://www.mauimillionaires.com/}