A Faster Way to Increase Your Sales

As we know, nothing happens by itself and everything has a cause and an effect.  This causality is explained as Dependent Origination, which means that something is always depending on something else, and without the origin of something, something will not happen.  

The reason is nothing is absolute or permanent.  Everything is relative and impermanent.  Nothing exists on its own, but arises from something else.  Things continue to exist and transform owing to the coming together and dissolution of factors. 

This natural law can be simply stated as: When A arises, B comes to be.  When A does not arise, B does not come to be. Similarly, when A ceases to arise, B ceases to come to be. In short, without A, there is no B.  With A, there is B. 

So this explains where your business come from.  Understand that there are multiple causes, i.e., many As and Bs.  All these factors interact with one another and each is a cause and also an effect for something else.  The 7 common causes of your business include:

1. Your sales and marketing efforts
2. Your reputation in the market, which is determined by how well your customers are served in the past
3. Your competitors' actions, which may draw business towards you
4. Your staff actions, which are determined by how skilled and trained they are (for the 9 things that sales training must cover, click here)
5. Your company's leaders and management decisions and actions
6. Your business environment and climate
7. Your customers' state, both monetary and emotional

Knowing Dependent Origination means that we are the masters of our business. All we need to know is to identify the links where we can interfere and manipulate. For example, if there is a lack of sales leads, you can interfere by stepping up your marketing efforts.  

But note that there is no need to find out the first cause, as doing so is not productive as the first cause could be too far away.  Everything is circular and not linear, there is no starting and no ending, only doing.  A faster way is to find out the cause that caused the most impact to the outcome, and we just tackle that would be enough.  For most businesses, the single one factor that cause business would be sales and marketing.  For others, it could be to step up on training.  For training on the 7 effective ways to sell, see here. 

By Andy Ng of Asia Trainers, details of courses at here.  Related articles:

1. Fire your customers and make 80% more business
2. The 71 Costless Ways to Increase Sales
3. The 9 things that sales training must cover
4. Heart Selling vs Hard Selling: which is more effective?
5. A tale of 2 companies in Singapore
6. The most important element in sales training