A Sales Wheel

Here’s a neat way of gaining crisp focus on what you currently, and hope to, sell to your customers.  I came across it just now with one of my prospects having used it as part of a training initiative, aimed at embedding a new way of thinking about opportunities into their sales culture.

The principle is simple.  If you want to sell more to a customer, it pays to have appropriate focus.  Why put in loads of effort, yet only make the same money back?

Each sales wheel has just three spokes.  Here are the simple steps to give you clarity:

1. So first draw a circle (your ‘wheel’) on a piece of paper.
2. Take a single customer and decide what their total spend, in cash terms, is (or can be) on all the products they buy that you can supply, and write the value outside your ‘wheel’.
3. Imagine the sales wheel is a pie chart, how would you draw the pie slice that represents their total spend with you?  Put these in as the first two spokes of the wheel.  This area is known as the Customer Segment, and put the cash amount in it.
4. The rest of the wheel, must therefore represent all the extra spend that you want to get your hands on.  Yet to gain this tight focus talked about earlier, and maximise chances of getting into this spend, it’s best to split this up in two.  So next, think of the specific areas of spend you want to target immediately, and put in your spoke and add the cash amount.  This part is the Product Segment.
5. The final area of three shows the Market Segment.  This is all other spend that we’re going to focus on another time.  Again write in the money.
6. The idea being, you now develop just two strategies for the year ahead: 1) how to defend my Customer Segment.  2) how to grow into the Product Segment. 

And this focus I reckon will pay off.