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Creating Your Formula for Selling a Small Business

Creating Your Formula for Selling a Small Business

A Deeper Dive Into Improving the Drivers that Affect Business Value

Scientific Marketing and Sales (Part 2 of 4)

This month I’m covering specific things you can do in your business to increase its value, make it more salable and make it easier to do succession.  In this post I’ll be discussing the second of our four topics, scientific marketing and sales.

Where do your sales come from?  Who are your best customers or clients?  How well can you define them?  Can you define them in terms of size, industry, geography, and behavioral terms? If you are using a proposal based sales process, what are your conversion rates from of leads to prospects, of prospects to proposals, of proposals to sales?  If you are using a form of direct marketing, do you know how much it costs to acquire a sale?  Do you know how many initial sales convert into longer-term customers and the value of each?  If you are using advertising to you have a way of measuring the effects of any given ad, ad campaign, or promotion?

This is just a sample of the kinds of information that has the ability to drive increasingly improving marketing and sales results.  A business that can explain exactly where its business is coming from and how it comes sets it apart from the vast majority that ‘kind of have an idea’.  The term ‘scientific’ is used because of two aspects to this type of marketing and sales management.  First it is data driven.  This means consistently collecting information, measuring, and analyzing it.  Second, when we have this type of data systems we can use the scientific method to test new marketing and selling ideas.  We can create a hypothesis, test it, measure the results, and then adjust what we are doing.

Businesses who have never done this and start implementing these processes see significant sales and profit improvements which of course drives sale, marketability, and ability to do succession.

Want to learn more?  Contact me at michael@podolny.com