Setting sale: is your business anchored down by a stale sales plan? Learn how to navigate the 5 biggest sales challenges facing entrepreneurs today, and get back on course

Entrepreneur, August, 2004 by Chris Penttila

SALES CHALLENGE No. 2:

INCREASING MARKET SHARE

Expanding a customer base is getting harder: Fifty-three percent of sales leaders in the Miller Heiman study believe their companies will grow this year by increasing share in existing markets, but more than half admitted that selling new products and services remains a significant challenge.

Blame it on complexity and competition. Roughly 70 percent of firms in the CSO Insights study say competitive activity is increasing, and nearly two-thirds say products are getting more complex and harder to sell.

To spur market-share growth, companies are reinvesting in sales and product training. They're increasing salespeople's access to product experts. And there's new emphasis on understanding the core of a product or a service's value proposition to retain current customers and lure business away from the competition. "Don't debug your product," Trailer says. "Debug your sales process."

ATA Services aims for 3 to 5 percent of a bank's annual ATM budget. "We think we've hit a home run if we get that," Robson says. "Most [banks] have a slush fund, and our job is to get that slush fund." At press time, ATA Services was closing in on a $5 million contract with a large bank, and it hopes to break into the Canadian bank market.

Increasing market share comes down to solving a problem instead of hawking a product, and that means finding out what's not working for prospects. "Look for areas of pain, and try to sell against those," says Robson. It also requires staying focused on a specific market segment. "We do ATM-related [work]," Robson says. "We don't do windows, and we don't change their oil. This specialization has allowed us to get deeper into our customers' budgets than some of our competitors."

Communispace is spending more time trying to build relationships with existing accounts than trying to sell new business, Hessan says. The company's salespeople point to very specific examples of how the company's software has helped clients accelerate their product development process. "We've invested more in understanding prospects before we make the call, and we're really getting educated," says Hessan.

Companies are putting more emphasis on upselling, cross-selling and building strong referral programs; and they're giving good salespeople more discretion to determine which clients and prospects are best suited to such opportunities. "There's a place for the cross-sell and the upsell, and I think it's smart to do it. But you have to know when to do it," says Denis Pombriant, CRM industry analyst and founder and managing principal of Stoughton, Massachusetts-based research and consulting firm Beagle Research Group, which specializes in the CRM and Internet infrastructure markets. "Companies simply need to get into the mind-set of the customer."

SALES CHALLENGE NO. 3:

INCREASING CUSTOMER LOYALTY

Product life cycles are getting shorter, making it tougher to differentiate one product or service from another. Customer loyalty is harder to come by as a result: Sixty-four percent of sales leaders in the Miller Heiman study believe buyers treat their specific industry as a commodity-driven market