Sales Velocity Secrets: How to Generate Consistent Revenue & Fuel Your Brand

Hello and welcome to the show. Recently I was having a conversation with a potential customer or potential client and our discussion in our discussion a couple of juicy stuff came up. So I figured I'd just hop on here on the podcast real quick and share some of those insights. Now the potential customer like most of you who reach out, you know you have different goals that you want for your business and we were able to isolate the two of the key things that you wanted to achieve for her business was to help the brand and also to make consistent sales.

So one part of the conversation was me trying to educate or rather set the right expectation because you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time. You will know that it's part of my business philosophy that to be to improve your sales and the quality of people that you're talking to and also to improve the customer experience, the client experience, you need to be able to set expectations very clearly and from the get from the beginning.

Because if you set the expectations wrongly, you have people getting into business with you and they think that you're going to be able to achieve certain outcomes for them when you didn't promise it. And it's not something that you can directly achieve. Oh, by the way, if you guys hear any noise in the background, that's because it looks like the rains are here finally. So it's raining outside. But anyway, you know how I do it.

I, I don't always wait for perfectly quiet conditions to make the recording. So I'm just hopping on the on the phone right now and just getting it done. So, yeah, so that was part of my setting expectations that brand, that brand is not something directly related to sales because there are lots of sales activities that give you the Intel that you need and can influence your brand perception in the market. But when it comes to building a sales framework, increasing revenue, brand is not a direct how I put it.

Brand is not a direct, is not a direct focus of sales activity, let me put it that way. And so my advice to her was that she would hold on hold off brand conversations for the future at least for six months, because in my own opinion in working together we're going to be able to achieve a couple of things once we executed the sales plan. Now if we came up with a good sales framework and processes, we're going to be able to get some data.

Sorry, excuse me, sore throat. Where was I? Yeah. So we're going to be able to get some data from executing the sales process. And some of that information that we're going to get will be the ideal customer profile. We're going to be able to figure out who her ideal customers are. That is either the people that she makes the most money from or the people that she has the most fun working with. Either way, if there's an overlap between those two, then those are definitely the people that we should be running after,

because there's a whole bunch of you who are in business who have no idea about who the ideal customer they should be chasing. So I told her that in a couple of months, we're going to be able to figure out the ideal customer profile, narrow down her value proposition. That's the value that she brings to the market, why people love doing business. With her. We would have figured out the sales channels that she works best with and also figured out her style of interaction and her voice.

Now I said all of these things would be necessary for the brand conversations that she's going to be having when she gets a brand person later on, you know, six months from now. And also if she starts talking to a public relations person. So I told her I'll hold it off, let's run these sales things first. These are the benefits that we're going to be able to get when we execute the sales conversation and sorry, the sales frameworks.

And then when you now start having conversations with brand people, things are going to run a whole lot smoothly. So if you are business owner out there who is thinking of engaging professionals to grow your business, I really don't think you should start off these conversations with the brand and the public relations person except if you already know who your ideal customer is. You've narrowed down your value proposition, You know what sales channels that you work best on and you have a firm idea of what your your style of interaction is, your brand, voice and all those sorts of things.

So if you figure these out by yourself, then sure, no problem it makes sense to bring in the PR person or a brand person. But either way, I think it's not a bad idea to start off bringing a consultant in or professional in to look at things from the from the sales element. Now I'm not saying that sales solves everything, because sometimes what you have actually is a management problem. Maybe everything is running all right, you guys just need to tweak your management style or maybe do human resource concerns or things like that.

But for most of you who are early stage founders or you're just recently self-employed, things like that, you're trying to get the business off the ground. The major focus for now should be sales, and in trying to execute on the sales process, you get all the information that you need to start informing the other thing. So it's from running sales that you'll be able to see whether you guys have a communication problem, a breakdown in management and all those sorts of things.

Then the second part of the conversation that we had was second strategy. So a second goal because remember how the first goal was help the brand and the second goal was increase sales rather than make consistent sales. So I tried to set the expectation that yes, we can achieve consistent sales, but it is something that is effort driven and it's not something that you turn on a tap or you do this tip or this tactic and then everything works.

So it's effort driven and it depends on the willingness, the capability and the the hard work that the team on ground is going to put into it. Because me coming in as a business development consultant or a sales coach or whatever in your business, there's no way that I'm going to be able to stand in front of the hall and do some magic and then your profits will increase. I'm going to be having conversations with you guys.

I'll be trying to coach your people through certain things and we'll try to execute on the framework that we agree upon to grow your business. But The thing is, if you guys are not willing to put in the work, then there's no how that the organization is going to turn around because there's no how. I mean, I'm not Superman. I'm not going to come into your organization and you know because I'm so smart, I'm going to start doing this, doing this and then your business is going to now thrive overnight.

It's effort driven. If you guys are not willing to put in the work, nothing is going to move. And to try and flesh that out, I introduced her to the concept of something called the sales Velocity. Spoken about it on the podcast, but I think that was maybe in the first year of the podcast. I think right now we're over year three, maybe heading into year four, and we currently have over 810 episodes. So if you're new to the podcast,

there's lots of good juicy stuff over here. After you're done listening to this episode, skip back. You have 810 at the very least that you can go back and learn lots of interesting stuff on. Oh, by the way, I noticed that people who reach out to me on LinkedIn, WhatsApp, people discovered the podcast. I noticed that a whole bunch of you seem to, what's that word binge. You guys seem to binge on episodes. And yeah, that's not a bad idea to take the episodes, download,

download a whole bunch of them binge, and then listen, using them as learning opportunities. And I really think that that's the best way to make use of podcast. Now. It doesn't have to be my own podcast because there are other sales podcasts out there. Nigerian. OK, well, I haven't come across another Nigerian podcast. This is Ghanaian dude. What's his name? Paul Fo. Then there's also of course the usual names, the UK and in the US.

So. But I really think that this is the best way to take advantage of them. So take it, binge it, listen, make notes, go out and try. So yeah, sales velocity, something I've spoken about on this podcast, something in sometime in the past, a couple of years ago, maybe 2-3 years back. So I introduced her to the concept of sales velocity. And the velocity just answers the question, how much, how much business am I doing, How well is the sales chugging along?

And so to figure out the sales velocity, the answer to the question is you have to look at the number of things. So sales velocity is determined by the number of opportunities. That's how many people are you talking to? Then the deal size, how much money is on the table? How much money are you trying to close to close per client? Then the win rate. If you talk to a bunch of people, how much business do you close? So if you talk to 10 people, do you end up doing business with eight or with three or maybe with one?

And then we'll also have to look at the sale cycle, which is how long does it take you to close that business? Does it take you 3 weeks to tour somebody and win the business or does it take you six months to pursue the person or pursue rather to pursue the person and then win the business? Now sales cycle, it depends, depends on what it is that you're trying to achieve. If you're going to the market to buy a Gucci, the sales cycle is like, I don't know, 5 minutes 'cause you get there, how much it tells you is 3500 per cup.

You guys are go and then you buy 5 minutes, you're done. If you're buying a house on the other hand, sales cycle much longer. But these are the sorts of things that we look at when we're talking about sales velocity. You know, how healthy are the sales? How much money are you guys making? Also, one moment. The kids need my attention. I'll be right back. All right, guys, I'm terribly sorry about that. Making this recording late into the night at home as usual.

So the kids needed something. So I had to stop. And yeah, we'll sort that out. OK. Now I was at sales velocity. Yeah, that's where we were. And I spoke to you guys about the different elements involved in sales velocity. That's I'm trying to figure out your sales velocity, how was the health of all the sales activity, how much money do we expect to bring in all those sorts of things. So the elements again are the number of opportunities.

So how many people are we talking to the deal size, how much money do we expect to get out of this transaction, the win rate, how many people do we end up doing business with and then the sales cycle. So I was talking about how if you want to achieve consistent sales, it's effort driven. So it's not about the the strength of the consultant that you bring in, but how much effort that your team is willing to put in. So let's look at the individual elements, a number of opportunities.

So that means if you call me in to speak to your organization or let's say you're a solo person and so you know I'm over at your office, you know you and me, we're chatting live, direct. We're not going to make any progress. If at the end of the day, you're just not putting in the numbers, you're not putting in the work. Because the number one thing for sales velocities, number of opportunities. If you're only talking to one person per month, you can see that sales velocity, the scope for that is limited.

The person who is talking to five opportunities a month, you see that there's a difference between talking to five prospects a month or talking to one. Then again, the person who is discipline enough to talk to maybe 150. Now for a solo printer, you're just starting off business yourself. Chances are you're probably not going to be talking to 100 people the month, but you get my idea. If you're talking to only one person a month, if you're talking to 10 people a month,

that's a probability thing. The chances go up. So yeah, so you have to put in the effort. How many people are you guys talking to every day, every week? And the deal size, it's not just talking to people who have to be talking with people and then looking at doing some good transactions here. Now of course, you know, there's some things that come per industry that you just take because, you know, you guys pay the bills, as in you just have to make do.

So like back in the wedding photography days, you know, I'm not going to front. I've spoken about it before. My first wedding I did it for 50K and executing the whole thing plus transport was 47 grand. So you can see that that was not really a good deal 'cause I only made 3K on that. But The thing is you know sometimes nothing is coming in at all and so you know anyhow, anyhow let me just take this deal at least let me just see 10K, let me see 20K.

So yeah, that happens, but we should be looking at number of opportunities and we should be looking at good deal size and then we should try to optimize, optimize our win rate. So if we're talk to 10 people and we're doing business with two, you know even next month we're able to increase it and we talked to 10 people who do business with three or four, then of course you know things improve. So yeah, sales velocity, these are the things that go into looking at how what is the speed or the acceleration that your business is making when it comes to sales and it's purely effort driven.

So whether you guys call in me or some other person just know that there's nobody that can come in and do the magic. At the end of the day it's all going to be you and these are the things we're going you have to be paying attention to. How many people are you talking to? All the people that you're talking to? How many of those deals are good deals? And don't worry, everybody has to take all those in all those cherry weighted deals.

You know as in Shah, let me just manage, let me just at least let me use, let me see something and buy credit or see something and buy fuel or buy pure water, you know that that kind of thing. So how many people am I talking to? What's the size of the deal? And then how many people are, how many people am I closing? A lot of that it is going to be determined by you and how much effort that you're willing to put to the table, bring to the table.

So that's it. Summary conversation with a potential client. These are some of the juicy Nuggets that I think will be will come in handy for a bunch of you listening to the show right now. So if you want to solve sales problems, sorry, brand problems, the sales consultant might not directly help you with that. But working with the sales consultant, you're definitely going to get some good value because you're going to be able to figure out your value proposition, your ideal client,

the sales channels you work with, your brand voice. Then when you start talking to your brand person, you guys are going to make huge progress because you work with the sales guy 1st. And so that's why I advocate sales first before other things. By the way, like I said, it's contextual. For those of you who already have solid businesses up and running, standard operating procedures, blah blah blah, some of your problems might be cash flow problems.

So you shouldn't be talking to a sales problem, sales professional. Some of your problems might be management problems, so you shouldn't be talking to a sales professional. So it's all contextual then consistent sales to get. That all depends on the kind of effort that you're going to bring, you're going to bring to the enterprise, so you guys ought to get ready. Talk to lots of people or as many people as you can. Make sure that the deals are nice, juicy deals.

Don't worry. We all take all those small, small deals just to get by. It happens whether you're a wedding photographer or you're a lawyer or you're a tailor. It happens. And then you try and increase the number of deals that you end up closing. So it's been over 15 minutes, so let me bring it to the close here. Thank you very much for listening to the show. My name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm the host. Please follow me on LinkedIn.

That's where I spend most of my time. You can confirm the spelling of my name from the link where you're currently listening to this episode. Also, connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140. I check out Telegram once in a while, so if you send me some on Telegram I might see it, but WhatsApp, LinkedIn. I'm there every day. Oh, country code +234. That's for those of you who are not Nigerian. Thanks for your time and attention.

I'll catch you guys at the next recording.