FEBRUARY 2011 - National Eyecare Group

18
BUSINESS VIEWPOINT
‘SALES’
IS NOT
A DIRTY WORD
Lee Williams, owner of Academy Eyewear, urges members to view the sales process as an intrinsic part of continued business success.
How many times have you said to yourself, as a New Year starts, ‘My staff
need sales training’? How many times have you and your staff decided to
carry on regardless, without having a sales strategy at the centre of your
business? How many times have you reminded yourself that, for your
patients, a visit to the optician is really about a professional service and has
nothing to do with sales? Or does it? In this article, I will argue that by
including an organised sales strategy in your business, you will ensure its
prosperity without having to lower your professional or ethical standards.
Let’s start again. Welcome to 2011 and,
please, I urge you to ‘wake up and smell
the coffee’. Whether you like it or not,
many profession-based businesses are
increasingly recognising that they have
to use sales as a vital tool. These
forward thinkers realise the sales
process is an intrinsic part of business
success, and plays a crucial role in team
spirit and staff motivation. Many of you
will be aware of this need to a greater or lesser extent, however, most of
you without doubt will be avoiding the reality. We at Academy Eyewear
believe that for you to prosper as an independent optician, you and your
team need to establish a sales strategy that lies at the very heart of your
business. Call it what you will – ‘sales’, ‘helping people to buy’, ‘a byproduct
of your professional service’ – the crucial step is to embrace a
‘selling culture’. You need to dispel the belief that somehow sales as part
of the professional service is not that important. It is one of the most
important aspects of your business.
Overcome your fears
My own business has sold to the profession for 15 years and I have walked
through a practice door most days of those years. I have sat down and
waited to see the decision maker, and I have always observed ‘the good,
the bad and the ugly’. This is the phrase I use to witness the process of
practice staff ‘helping people to buy’. In most cases, I witness the same old
thing and recognise that not much has changed. One word that always rolls
off the tongue is ‘demarcation’. This word shrieks at me every time I am in
a practice. (Definition of demarcation: ‘The act of establishing limits or
boundaries and/or of a strict separation of the kinds of work performed by
different members of staff’.) The process of selling to patients is, by and
large, passed on to staff with no sales training, in a business with little or
no sales strategy. I have noticed practice owners/managers often reneging
on their responsibility to arm both themselves and their staff with the
necessary skills to execute the sales process, which in essence is the very
process that keeps their business in business.
Why is this behaviour so prevalent in the independent sector in the UK?
Without doubt I am discussing this in general terms, but it doesn’t detract
from the fact that at the core of UK optics there is a genuine fear of
‘selling’. The message here is quite clear – we all need to stop frightening
ourselves with the word, stop feeling that in some way ‘the sale’, ‘the
helping people to buy’, will look after itself. It won’t. Take control of your
business and its driving force – and that driving force is sales. If you are an
independent practitioner on or nearby the High Street, it goes without
saying that the highest levels of professional service must be of paramount
importance to your business. However, the emphasis on sales must now
come a very close second. The start of 2011 is as good a time as any to
start to introduce a selling culture in your practice, regardless of its size.
Skirting around the issue
In April 2010 I participated in a well known buying group’s conference. It
was great, in a lovely hotel with good food, etc. The whole message was
about ‘surviving’ but each guest speaker skirted around the subject of
sales. We had an athlete talk about ‘success’; we had a motivational
speaker talk about, well, nothing; we had a so-called ‘marketing freak’ who
talked a lot about ways to market oneself but with no real focus. Not one
of them tackled the ‘dark art’ of selling.
Everybody without exception served up the peripheral niceties; we had a
succession of sickly sweet ways of not really serving up to the profession
the fact that they really had to (in the end) roll up their sleeves and sell. But
not one of these presentations got down to the nitty-gritty and made a case
for sales, sales, sales.
I waited the whole day and stupidly thought that the other presentations
would lead to the ‘ultimate truth’ – that nothing happens until something is
sold. But I was wrong – the ultimate truth remains unspoken and is avoided