Week 09: Sales

Before we get onto the main subject of this month - planning your sales - the time has come to have your meetings with the bank managers. The book deals with this meeting in detail, giving you an idea of the questions they will ask and also what you should ask them.

At the end of this meeting you can create a decision grid to help you work out which bank managers to stay in touch with, and which ones to say 'no thanks' to. Unfortunately a printing error meant the decision grid was mistakenly left out of the book, so here it is in full:

Decision Grids

A decision grid is where you write down the names of the things or people you are trying to decide between along the top of a column each, then down the left hand side you list the things that are important to you in making the decision.

You also include a column for 'weighting'. This is the score you give to each factor in the decision, based on how important you think that factor is. Use a number between 1 and 10.

You then give each thing a score under each factor, and multiply that score by the weighting.

So, let's say you are using a decision grid to choose cheese to serve at a dinner part (I don't suggest you really do this, people will think you've really lost it. This is just an easy example. (Smile) )

You are trying to choose between Brie, Stilton and Cheddar. You decide that the important factors in your decision are how posh the cheese is seen to be (it is a dinner party after all), how ready the cheese in the supermarket is to eat, what price the cheese is, and how much you like the cheese yourself.

So a decision grid based on this would look like:

You now need to give a weighting to each factor based on how important it will be in your decision. Use numbers between 1 and 10 - the higher the number, the more important the factor

So in this case, it's more important that the cheese will be nice and ready to eat, and less important what it costs. You rate whether your friends will think it's posh higher than whether you actually like it. You're so middle class.

The next step is to give each thing a score under each factor, and multiply this score by the weighting to get the final score.

So:
* The Brie is posh, not ready to eat, expensive, but you really like it.
* The Stilton is fairly posh, reasonably ready to eat, expensive, and you don't mind it.
* The Cheddar isn't very posh, ready to eat, fairly cheap, but you don't like it much.

You now have weighted scores for each thing under each factor in the decision. The next thing is to add them up.

So, the Stilton wins.

Decision grids are a great way of making decisions between a number of things, based on a number of differentfactors. Use them when you next buy a car or a stereo system - they'll be a great help! They'll also be very useful in your business.

Planning your sales strategy

This week you need to work out a lot of the detail with regard to your sales. The book walks you through this, with the various questions you need to answer. Write these up into a short report for your business plan.