Do you have time to sell? - 360 Sales new member

[asa_cox]

Hi all

I started my little business www.360sales.co.uk in Sep2002 and have been pleasantly surprised by the current level of success.

I have worked for many small businesses in my time and always encountered the same dilema. The balance between putting resources into keeping existing customers happy Vs going out an getting new business in.

Everyone knows that customer service is vital; reputation, referrals etc etc but more often than not small business don't fulfill there potential because they cannot afford to dedicate enough time or money to sales.

To solve this dilema I set myself up as a highly flexible, low-risk contract sales and marketing person. I develop marketing materials, cold call, run meetings, create email newsletters.. everything an employed member of staff would do, but without the big salary, expenses or long-term contractual commitment.

Its all well and good having a great product or service, a great support system and efficient management, but if you don't get more customers its all pointless.

I'm open to all opportunities; software, web design, advertising, clothes, pharmaceuticals and packaging are just some of the sectors I've worked in so far.

Would very much appreciate your thoughts on my business proposal and if anyone is interested in discussing partnerships or campaigns please feel free to contact me at any time.

Thanks for reading!

Asa

[gary]

Asa, I think it's a great service. Sales is so often an essential part of a business, but not many people are that good at it, or enjoy it. Outsourcing the sales function can be very useful I would have thought, but too often the cost outweighs the benefits, especially for small businesses just starting out, which I think is the biggest problem.

Gary

[SPRone]

Asa,

We also provide direct sales assistance to our clients as well as general advice and guidance on sales matters.

We have found strong demand for our services from companies with less than 6 employees. Employing a full-time sales person for companies of this size is difficult to budget for. Hence they are pleased to be able to make use of a third-party supplier who can provide 2 days per week, for example, of dedicated sales resource.

Many small companies find this beneficial because the alternative is that the management only spend time selling when they do not have enough business. This leads inevitably to the feast/famine syndrome and, in the worst case, will lead to the eventual collapse of the business when new business takes longer to generate than the company's cashflow will stand..

Gary, you raise an interesting point about this type of service being costly. Our standard approach is to take the salary that would normally be offered by the client to a permanent member of staff, add in a percentage to cater for the fact that we have the overheads that the client would otherwise have (e.g. NI payments, pension contributions, car allowance etc) and then convert this to a daily rate. This way it should be costing the client no more than it would to employ somebody directly. Where we make our money is on bonus and commission payments (which again the client would normally expect to pay an employee) and then over-achieve on targets through our expertise in selling. It's a win-win situation for the client provided that we deliver sales success. If we don't then the client can terminate our contract much more readily than they could dismiss an employee.

Another approach is that of referrals. Some clients are comfident of making sales to their prospects once they get in front of a well-qualified prospect. What they don't like doing is the lead generation/cold calling bit. So they leave that to us, we deliver qualified prospects and they (hopefully) convert those prospects into sales. Our reward is a percentage of the order value when the prospect becomes a customer. Again it's win/win for our client - they avoid the tasks they don't enjoy or are not good at and they only pay for our services when revenue is generated.

[Rick Hough]

We launched our company three years ago working part-time. We went full time last August with a business plan that should see us into profit by August of this year.

What we've developed is a route to market for businesses who want to reach sporty kids and families, and we get 2 million hits to our Website every month and growing fast.

We made a huge mistake early on by trying to set up a sales team ourselves. It just didn't work. We found ourselves running around trying to keep up with the sales team and didn't have the infrastructure to cope.

Despite high volumes of "sales" we found that hardly any of them were successfully converted by the sales team, who seemed to expect us to complete orders and sign up customers after they had an initial chat.

The experience put us back by half a year and wrecked our balance sheet for 02/03. We are now developing new lines and have opened our own shop which is doing brisk business.

Instead of trying to make the site pay we have since concentrated on getting people into what we offer, and month on month we are getting more and more interest and activity.

I wish we'd found a service like yours at that point in our development, it would have saved us months of pain!

[meepy]

it sounds very interesting

[BusinessIdeas]

Hiya asa, sounds very interesting but the link to your site doesnt work - Gina :)