Strengths

What’s the best places to start when you are looking to develop a new sales strategy?  Ir’s to understand what your sales team is good at.  You want to take advantage of what you do well and build on it. So let’s take a look at your strengths.

• What is it that your sales team does better than anyone else in the market?

• What do your current customers see as a benefit they get from working with your sales people?

• What strength does your current product line offer that your competitors can’t?

• Do you have unique sales process, product, or services that set you apart?

These are sample question you may want to answer, but try to come up with questions of your own. You want to ask about your USP, unique selling proposition that you see as a strength or your ability to service your accounts with one day service.  When you look to uncover your strengths, ask others within your organization to come up with strengths they feel the organization has and don’t forget to ask for help outside the organization.  Talk with you current customers and ask what they like about your organization, talk with vendors, or anyone else that can help give you a clear picture of your organizations strengths.

 

Weaknesses

Every sales team has them and as the sales manager you need to identify them early and take action.  The problem comes when sales managers hide from them hoping things will get better or the weaknesses will miraculously disappear.  They don’t, you have to face them, gain an understanding of why the weaknesses exist and look for ways to strengthen them.  So let’s write them down.

 

• What does the competitions see as your biggest weakness?

• What do your current customers see as a weakness in your sales style, product, or service?

• When you look at your lost sale report, why did those prospect not buy from you?

• What is it that you try to avoid?

Understanding your weaknesses provides you with a road map of the areas within your organization must work on, and areas that you must limit exposure until they are strengthened.  Remember that your Strengths and Weaknesses are both internal factors that you as a sales manager could have direct control over.  Once you understand what they are take every action possible the build on your strengths and eliminate your weaknesses.

 

Opportunities

I just finished reading a “I’m Feeling Luck: The confessions of Google employee Number 59″ by Douglas Edwards.  In the book he describes a a meeting where Sergey, one of the two founders of Google, ask the employees attending a meeting, Do you know the largest single cost we have at Google?”  The engineers all wanted to answer and yelled out answers from healthcare to food but they were wrong.  Sergey told them that the biggest cost was that of missed opportunity.

Opportunity is usually all around us, but i the hustle of day-to-day business we walk right past it.  It can come when a competitor stumbles, a new technology appears, the perfect new manager walks past your door, or a new law impacts your customers.  So let’s look and see what opportunities you see.

• What do you see as a good opportunity that will strengthen your organization?

• In what segment of your market are clients consistently making purchases?

• What high margin products or services can you expose to a broader market?

• Have you notices a change you can exploit in your market?

• Is their a market you can enter with greater profits potential?

As you look at opportunity it’s important that they must move hand-in-hand with your strengths. It’s not a good opportunity if it doesn’t fit your organization.

 

Threats

Threats like opportunities are external factors that have a major impact on your business.  As you maneuver your business around the challenges of the market place you have to understand where danger exist or you will find your self in trouble.  So what are the treats to your business?

• Does more that 25% of your sales revenue come from less than 10% of your customer base?

• What reoccurring challenges do you sales people face?

• Is their a competitor that consistently beats you in the marketplace?

• How much bad debt are you carrying

• Are sales meeting expectations?

Threats, like opportunities are external factors that you must constantly look for, examine and find ways to deal with them.

 

Conclusion

The SWOT Analysis is one of the best tools you can use to help sales managers develop a true understanding of where you are and where you need to be, before you try to take things to the next level.  This exercise is also a great way for you and your team to develop consensus and a way to understand exactly where your company stands before starting to chart a new course.