Would you like to launch another office or expand your business to an other location when the market is down?
Some say, "NO" because they don't have cash flow now and are struggling to make it in this economy.
Some say, "YES" because they have a profitable model that is replicatable and have funds to invest. They think, when everyone is scared that is the time to expand and grow.
If the latter is you, then here are the simple steps we learned the hard way on expanding our B2B company into other markets.
1. Find a sales person/force that is highly skilled at opening accounts.
That is different than a farming sales person who can maintain accounts. This sales force must know how to cold call accounts, quickly process incoming leads from any social media campaigns you have done, and will willing to look for opportunities anywhere.
2. Send your best operations people to the new city to fulfill initial orders.
The worst thing to do is to give mediocre order fulfillment to jobs you are starting. You want jobs done right so you can leverage referrals and get a positive word-of-mouth going about your company.
3. Hire operations people in the new city and have them mentored by the operations people from step 2.
Get quality people hired, trained and working for you.
4. Hire sales force and have them mentored by the launch team of step 1.
The launch team knows the accounts they created and are best at coaching the local new hired sales reps the in's and out's of those accounts.
5. Provide training on farming the accounts that are going while still working to get new accounts.
One of the best training systems we used was Strategic Selling by Heiman and Miller. They will learn how to establish themselves in a large account with strong multiple contacts.
EVERYTHING should be documented in procedures. Before we wrote procedures for our operations people it took 3 months to train them. Now- 2 weeks. In writing procedures I highly recommend Michael Gerbers book E-Myth Mastery.
Like this article - very succinct and useful. Especially timely for me as that is exactly what I am doing currently. Many thanks!
ReplyDelete