Sales Machine: Definitive Guide to Structuring Your Sales Machine
Attracting customers in a continuous flow is essential for a company to remain in the market, but growing a business’s sales is not a simple task. If you want to leverage your sales, maybe it’s time to learn what a sales machine is. The growth of a company depends on the joint work of different areas, such as marketing, sales, production and supply. Even more occasional factors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to adopt a home office, for example, end up interfering. All of this affects your business’s relationship with the market and customers. Therefore, having a sales machine is essential to maintain the stability of your business. This concept was created to help your company grow and stay in the market. So, if this is your goal as an entrepreneur, read on! What is a vending machine? Sales machine is the expression used to explain the process of structuring a scalable sales model. That is, this concept designates optimized actions and processes designed to support a constant volume of newleads in your company. A sales machine must always be scalable and deliver solutions that really make sense for the customer. In other words, it’s like a roadmap of steps your company should take to increase lead capture and retention. The term was invented by Aaron Ross, in the publication of the book“Predictable Revenue”, and comes from English Sales Machine. In the book, the author tells how he created a sales machine that earned more than 100 million dollars for the pioneering company of the strategy, Salesforce. What Aaron did was to structure a lead generation growth process, continuously generating opportunities. This is what defines an effective sales machine today. The vending machine is: Scalable; Profitable; Predictable. Scalable, as its objective is to increase the number of customers. Profitable, because the objective of every company is the profit. It’s predictable because it’s essential that your company’s projected future matches what’s happening in the present. After all, you can’t imagine that your future will be billions if your company’s revenue hasn’t even reached the hundreds of thousands. In that case, keeping your foot on the ground about your company’s growth is essential. It is also essential that the vending machine is profitable. That is, your customers need to give a return greater than what was spent to acquire them (ROI). This means that if you have a marketing campaign that costs 2,000, for example, and it only brought 2 customers, the cost of each customer was 1,000 reais. In this case, the only thing that would pay for the campaign would be if both customers spent more than a thousand reais, which is unlikely in many scenarios. In this sense, the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) must always be as low as possible, as this means more profit. Therefore, the sales machine is the whole process and mapping to increase your sales numbers and profit more and more. Scalability and sales machine A scalable company is a company that manages to increase its revenue without necessarily increasing its costs. In other words, it is a growing company. Every company wants to be scalable, have continuous growth and profit greater than its expenses (even if this is not always the case for all scalable companies). There are two scalability models within a business: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal scalability model has as main objective to make the company a reference in the market in general. In this way, the company seeks to maintain a varied range of customers and segments, with the objective of remaining relevant in the market as a whole. We can give as an example of a company with horizontal scalability Coca-Cola, which in addition to the soda, today is also a brand of clothing, sneakers and much more. In horizontal scalability, the company seeks growth within its specific market niche, focusing on the company’s specific products and services. It is necessary to define which type of scalability your company wants to focus on before creating the sales machine, as this model intends to standardize its entiresales strategy in line with your company’s goals. The goal of the sales machine is to keep the flow of customers continuous, just as the goal of scalability is to keep growing. By putting these two concepts together, it is possible to create a sales machine that increases your company’s ability to scale in the market and grow even more. Therefore, for those who want to increase the company’s revenue without necessarily increasing costs, creating a sales machine is paramount. How to make a vending machine? The vending machine takes its name because it is also composed of parts and gears. That is, there are several parts of a process so that the whole structure makes sense. All parts of the company need to be engaged with the sales machine: the team, the metrics, the strategies, everything. For example, there is no point in having a structured and perfect process if your employees are not trained to execute it. If the team does not understand the process, the process will not be used and therefore will be meaningless. That’s why everything has to be working properly for the sales machine to bring results. Implementing a sales machine in your company necessarily means reviewing your business’ commercial approach. That is, review the sales strategies and techniques used by your employees. So, before you decide to make a vending machine, be aware that this is a laborious strategy. However, once the sales machine is working properly, all sectors of your business will be much more in tune with each other – and the flow of customers will inevitably increase. Below, we will mention the main tips and strategies to make a sales machine for your business. We are specialists in business between companies. Get in touch and find out how we can help! Define a sales strategy Defining a commercial strategy is essential to establish the sales machine and create your company’s