029: Sales Performance - with Richard Higham Part 1

This episode is the first part of a three part series in boosting your sales performance. Richard has extensive experience in this field and across the series he shares his 12 key strategic areas to consider in your business, as well as practical tools and hints to support your planning, process and performance.   KEY TAKEAWAYS: We've got to generate high growth in low growth economies. If that was true before COVID, and it was, it's even more true now when it's uncertain where growth is going to come from. Trust built out of a mixture of credibility, reliability, and intimacy. Stephen Covey (Senior) is always talking about ‘start with the end in mind’. And as a business leader, I'm absolutely focused on where we want to take the business and where we want to be in five years’ time and everything we do, is centred on that So 10% of your clients will be generating 50% of your revenue. So if you can identify your top 10% and say each one, what are they likely to deliver, you'll probably have a clear picture on your 50% of your income, you will then want to extend it out to the next 10% you'll get another 30% of your income on top, you've covered 80% analytics   BEST MOMENTS: “I think we got to look, historically, sales have been flaky. And we've been retrospective. So we've used lagging indicators. How much did we sell last month? Well, that tells us whether we had a good month or not. So we've got to move from lagging indicators to leading indicators. What are the things that are going on which tell us what will be happening so that when you go into a management meeting or board meeting, whatever it might be, you're talking about the indicators that can give the business confidence to know what will happen.” “These things will tell us what's going to happen in the future and will also allow you to coach and manage performance. But we've also got to make sure that we're communicating that stuff clearly. No having multiple Excel spreadsheets that nobody can understand or read, and which take hours to put together, move away from that, get real clarity, and concision into what we're communicating. And then communicate early and communicate in a way that's relevant to me.”   RESOURCES: SalesLevers website: https://www.saleslevers.com/   ABOUT THE HOST Sarah Myerscough is the Sales and Marketing Director of Boston Tullis Group. The founder of The Insurance Brokers Podcast, she brings a wealth of marketing experience and a fresh perspective on marketing in the insurance sector. Boston Tullis works with insurance brokers to offer solutions to business development ceilings, particularly in the rapidly developing fields of video marketing and thought leadership. If you would like Sarah to help you develop an integrated marketing strategy, using state of the art concepts, then please book a free 20 min call via Calendly    Website: https://bostontullis.co.uk/ Evaluation Link: https://s.bostontullis.co.uk/s/podcastevaluation ABOUT THE GUEST Richard Higham is an Executive Director at SalesLevers; a business that enables companies to drive sales performance in a radically changing sales world. Richard has over 25 years of experience in sales performance consulting. He has won, designed and led consulting and training projects with global banks, insurers and professional services firms across five continents. He has also worked on sales performance in sectors ranging from logistics to manufacturing. Richard also teaches on the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Postgraduate Diploma in International Sales course and runs business development and leadership programmes for Cass Business School at the University of London.   LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richardhigham Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardHigham