Expert advice pays off for sales firm
Decision to call in a consultant after orders plunge proves beneficial for businessman, who learns some hard truths about his management skills
Last year, my custom conference table business suffered a collapse in sales that caused me a great deal of anguish. I hired a sales consultant. This was expensive, costing almost US$38,000, but the knowledge vastly increased sales.
Here is a quick recap of our sales process at the time the trouble started. Inquiries were coming to us in two forms: as e-mail or as phone calls. We would ask a series of technical questions meant to reveal the functional aspects of the potential client's table needs. We would also ask about the budget. If we received answers, we prepared a proposal, a PDF that contained images of the options we recommended and information on wood choices and pricing.
We saw these proposals as a good way to demonstrate our engineering skills and craftsmanship. I had developed the format myself, and we had used it to good effect, with more than US$16 million in sales since 2003. I also developed an assembly-line method for the proposals: ask questions, design like crazy and send them off. Next!
At the beginning of last year, I set a sales target of US$200,000 a month, and in the first two months of the year, we hit it. But March came in weak: we sold only US$135,732. April was almost as bad. And May was even worse. I hired five people in 2011 to ensure that I could get US$200,000 worth of work out the door each month. That was now looking like a mistake.
I decided my problem was the economy. In spring last year, there was a lot of chatter about poor job growth and the possibility of a double-dip recession. I latched on to that story and convinced myself that the problem was out of my hands. Then, in May last year, I expressed my concerns to my peer group and got some good advice from the other business owners - namely, that the problem was not the economy and that I needed to look within my own organisation. One of the members of the group said he had hired a sales consultant who had helped him double his sales in two years.
I called a consultant. While my main method had been to let my product speak for itself, to tell the story of how we designed and built tables, he suggested a different approach. His pitch was that we first needed to understand selling, pure selling.
