If your company is focused on US sales expansion, you’re not alone. Companies that operate in the US spend more than $20 billion a year to train salespeople on products, skills and territory management in hopes of growing their sales. But without having the specialized knowledge of specific techniques for building a sales organization, you may end up sinking money into a plan that just isn’t feasible or ends up falling flat. Here are some key initial steps for US sales expansion.
- Prepare:
Before making any major decisions about sales team outsourcing or sales consulting services, it’s important to take some time to gather appropriate data and statistics. This includes creating a market segmentation analysis to determine whether or not your product will sell in a local market, preparing a product gap analysis with other local products, performing a SWOT analysis against your competition, and making notes about market opportunity and sizing, estimating how long it will take to reach the desired sales target. Without this valuable data, you’ll have nothing to gauge your growth. - Strategize:
While each industry has its own subtleties due to economic, governmental, cultural, and market condition, it’s critical to develop a local-oriented strategy and plan for business that streamlines local success while remaining connected with the overall goal of the corporate strategy. Your business should aim to define short, medium, and long-term goals while keeping them reasonable and measurable. - Work as a team:
Next, it’s important to allocate a sufficient number of qualified employees to serve as a contract sales force. Their responsibilities will be lead generation, financial infrastructure maintenance, and permanent leadership team recruitment. Using employees who have proven leadership skills allow the new sales efforts to hit the ground running instantly instead of staying stagnant for weeks or months. - Follow the rules:
Before your sales expansion efforts are ready for initiation and implementation, it’s crucial to review government and industry-specific regulations to assure compliance and obtain proper certifications if necessary. You should also figure out if any localization of the product is actually necessary in addition to initiating a patent and trademark review. After that, initiate testing and quality assurance reviews.
Ultimately US sales expansion is difficult, but it’s not impossible. For more information about B2B sales, contact Sales Focus Inc.
