The Importance of Implementing Systems for a Growing Business

Now is the time when planning your sales strategies for 2009 to consider what systems you will put in place to help you offload repetitive, low level work so you can focus on higher value projects and prospects.

Systems are easier to put in place at the start of a month - and especially at the start of a new year. Make sure that you have some tracking mechanisms in place for:

• billable vs. non-billable hours (if you are a service provider)
• cost of goods / services sold
• tracking how many meetings / scheduled calls with prospects to create a sale (= your close ratio)

Also have a pipeline of some type so that you can see what stages your sales opportunities are in. This is so very important because you can fix sales issues easier by knowing where the slow-up in your process is. For example, if you are very good a qualifying sales opportunities but they are not turning into sales - you know right where to focus.

You can use a whiteboard with a funnel or pipeline and erasable markers OR you can invest in a very inexpensive web-based pipeline tool like Salesforce - or something in-between.

What do you measure, and what do you find the hardest to track?