Sales Time Is Now

Chief executives in the food industry are looking for more revenue. Out of the five primary services Blueberry provides, conversation usually comes down to, “How can you help us grow sales?”

The good news is that customers are still buying. There's no lack of artisan breads, desserts, marinara sauce, chicken breasts or appetizers on restaurant menus. Maybe they’re not turning as fast as before the recession, but plenty of products in your category are in development, being presented, sold, distributed and served in restaurants.

The bad news is when customers are not buying from your company.

Getting to the root of the problem to kick start new volume, we offer a few observations:

• Sludge in the sales pipelines is slowing down the system: There are too many poor targets, hits and misses, and too much activity unrelated to growing the top line number. Speed is everything in sales and many c-leaders are not taking active steps to free up valuable time and resources. The VP of Sales cannot do this to the extent a CEO can. He or she lacks the total-organizational scope, authority and accountability to remove bottlenecks and improve the process. In addition, the cost of activities unrelated to gains is high, and have very little to do with accumulating new sources of income for your company. Target accounts? Over half we've seen landed on the list without a snowball's chance of closing.
• The voice of the customer has grown dim or been lost in translation: It’s easy to make assumptions about what customers need from your organization. The information you get is usually watered down and filtered through internal channels. By the time business or opportunities are lost, it’s too late and the real reason for the defection is unknown as attention shifts to the next one. You need to know the truth about why customers are not buying from your company…and it’s rarely because of price.
• The wrong sales people are hired for the wrong reasons: A candidate has ‘relationships’ with certain high profile accounts and bingo—he’s hired. A VP of Sales recruits managers from a prior firm to build her “own team”. Smooth talkers, charismatic story tellers, likeable socializers…executives need to look past these behaviors and employ Sales Creators--experts in your products and services and in all aspects of sales from Prep to Interaction to Rapport to Pitch. You need people who will make the case for how doing business with your company adds value to the menu and helps improve customer revenue, grow profit and patron traffic. You need people who can communicate your company’s competitive advantage to avoid dickering about price. You need effective managers and excellent trainers, informed about the market and successful in fulfilling objectives.

Blueberry agrees that it’s time for chief executives to increase their focus on this critical area of the organization. Doing so relates to two of the top job's essential duties: Making sure there's plenty of money in the bank, and securing only the best talent for the company.

Revenue Masters

The dictionary defines a master as someone who is highly skilled or exceptional at something. Is your company a master at generating revenue?

The restaurant industry is optimistic but cautious about the future. The impact of rising commodity costs, gasoline, global unrest, and stubborn unemployment numbers can rattle consumer confidence and send patrons scurrying back to their own kitchens to hold onto their savings accounts. What’s a supplier to do?

Cost containment has been and should be an ongoing practice, but we believe that attention must now shift in a more focused and systematic way to revenue growth. Flat sales hurt financial performance more than rising costs. If a 5% growth rate is required to break even against rising costs, a shortfall gain of 4% requires 25% more cost reductions to meet the breakeven point.

Now factor in your company’s close ratio on new business. To avoid a direct hit to your bottom line, the profit from accounts that are won must carry the costs of those that are not—as well as other expenses that cannot be passed on to your selling price.

The ratio of customer wins to losses needs to improve. The recession provided an opportunity to uncover gaps in customer needs. The best suppliers use this knowledge to reinvent strategy, operations, innovation and organizational resilience—and are reflected in new revenue-generating behaviors. Here are a few broad-stroke examples:

• You have sharpened the account targeting process. This undervalued step frees up selling time to focus on best-chance opportunities and nail new volume quickly.
• At least 50% of your customer generation team is objectively rated as experts; in other words, they position your company’s offering with a razor-sharp value message, are unsurpassed in preparation, problem-solving, presentation and customer management skills. You have a systematic plan to transform remaining members into experts over the next 6 months. By developing experts, you dismiss the false assumption that customers form emotional attachments to sales managers that translate into new volume for your company.
• Your company’s value proposition has been tailored to today’s customer objectives to reduce food costs, labor costs and eliminate deep menu discounts.
• Your company carefully evaluates which industry functions provide the best use of sales time compared to other forms of account interaction. Let the results speak on this one.
• Your company outranks competition in highest value revenue-generation activities. This is from the customer perspective, not your company’s internal metrics.
• You as the CEO are directly involved in reviewing account targets currently on the table, asking the right questions about how or why they got there, the probability of close, and know the costs of getting business but of doing business. .
• The sales sludge has been removed from the pipeline, including some high profile targets that take years and substantial resources to close. Replace them with qualified accounts in new segments that spread risk and expand your company’s knowledge of emerging players.
• You have instilled confidence in current and prospective accounts that your company understands their competitive environment as well as your own and conform your value proposition to suit their objectives.

Each broad stroke requires detailed work to inset a revenue master culture in your organization. True, even best efforts may not prevent customer decisions that could negatively impact your business. But without taking proactive steps now, your company can migrate back to an internal focus--a paradox for supplier CEOs who should be looking intently to the outside to reconcile their company to the environment and grow revenue. It’s a brand new day and a whole new game.