Is your sales process chaotic?

Chaos. That's a word I heard three times this week.

I've been speaking with small business owners who wanted to see if SalesMotor - the sales automation system I built - was a good fit for their businesses.

I was surprised when three of them used the same word - chaos - to describe how they currently handle leads.

• They prepare lots of quotes, but nobody has time to follow up and close the deals.
• Leads are scattered. They're in emails, WhatsApp messages, notes and so on. There is no central store with all the leads they've received.
• They don't know which leads have been handled. They don't know what's been done, what needs to be done and so on.
• It takes too long to respond to enquiries.

It's overwhelming.

They know they should be responding faster. They know they should be following up. They know that not doing this is costing them sales. But sales is only one facet of the business. Every other facet is also competing for their attention.

I've known two of the three for at least 15 years. I respect them. They're smart, hard working and they've managed to stay in business for many years. They've survived two global economic crashes and a pandemic. They're doing a lot with limited resources.

Nobody starts a business to fast-track a heart attack. So we were speaking because they'd hoped that SalesMotor would bring calm to their chaos.

Two of the business owners saw the potential immediately. SalesMotor allows them to run their sales process the way they know they should, but have been too busy to be able to. With it they can:-

• Gather all their leads into one place so nobody gets overlooked or slips through the cracks.
• Keep all the information related to a lead in one place so it's easy to figure out what's happened and what needs to be done.
• Follow up on leads who they couldn't contact the first time they tried - automatically.
• Follow up on quotes, again automatically.
• See the status of every in-progress lead, no matter who in the office has been handling the lead.

They signed up right away.

The third meeting was different. It was with the business owner and his IT guy. The owner seemed to get the potential, but the IT guy was disappointed.

He wasn't interested in anything except 100% automation of everything. For example:-

• Their top technical sales person gets loads of emails about stock availability. He'd wanted a tool that would read the enquiry and send it to the right person. If it was a technical enquiry it'd go to the technical sales person. If it was about stock it'd go to the warehouse. A junior employee could do this with minimal training but he wanted AI.
• They do about 10 quotes a week. They don't follow up on any and so they're losing sales. Uploading a quote to SalesMotor takes 30 seconds, but he only wanted something if it would sync with their accounting software.

The longer the conversation went on, the more obvious it was that he wasn't going to settle for anything that didn't do everything. I wasn't surprised when they told me they would "think about it".

I don't mind not making a sale if we're not a good fit for each other, but I felt sorry for the business owner.

You see, the 100% everything system doesn't exist. It will have to be custom-built. That's going to take forever and it'll cost a bomb.

The business will still be chaotic in a year's time. Can you imagine how much another year of missed sales is worth?

50% better today beats 100% perfect never.

The truth is that when it comes to improving the sales end of the business 50% better today beats 100% perfect never. And while I understand the dream of a fully-automatic sales machine the simple fact is that you’ll make more sales today if:-

• None of your leads gets forgotten or slips through the cracks.
• You follow up on leads you couldn’t contact the first time you tried.
• You follow up on every quote or estimate you send.

You don't need perfection. You just need something that helps humans do better.

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