Know your Sales Market Share

Do You Know Your Sales Market Share?

How much of your products or services that you are selling is being sold globally, in your region, in your territory, in your counties, in your cities, whatever way you can obtain. Get it broken down  as much as possible. Why? It’s easier to Zero in on small pieces to take business away, than going in for a larger piece and scatter your efforts all over the place. Also if there is concentrated competition, it will make it easier to obtain competitive intelligence.

You do not create new clients or customers you take them from your competition. Do you have  a territory within a territory. Zero in on what has the largest concentrated potential you feel you can obtain or you can sell that achieves your target.

You want to attack a Sales Market Share in pieces.  Example, I live in Florida which is very big state  The largest counties are Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. Then you have all the counties throughout the state of Florida. If your territory is only Dade County, then break that up in sections and find out how much of the goods and products are being sold for you there. If your company does not have this data, research it. You can research on the internet or government sites. You may have to obtain this data via your prospecting or go back to  all your old proposals and add up the total gross totals for the year. Assume  there are proposals you know you did not present and add them in. Zero in geographically, by zip code is the best way if you can.

Then figure out what is the percentage you’re likely to take from the sales market and what will it take to reach your goal. If it isn’t large enough, then you need to expand it. You need to know how much market  share is in a territory. You should at least do every effort to find out or begin the process. This does not mean you do not begin the sales process. You should be obtaining and updating the sales  market share information as a normal part of your sales calls. If there’s a million dollars in revenue there, the possibility of getting 2 million doesn’t exist with a few exceptions. I am going to give you an example. I have a friend of mine that has a small IT shop and they have been struggling. He asks me  “ Victor, can you help me? We’re getting these new laws coming in for medical industry where they are going to need help in IT services and the government is giving  out contracts. I asked “Really, how big is the market?” It’s like 9 billion. 9 billion? Where? Globally. OK that’s great, what about your area. He felt he can provide service everywhere. I said, well, how much of that 9 billion are you going after?. He threw out a number, “10 percent”. That’s 900 million dollars. My response “You’re a 4 man operation, over what period of time do you expect to obtain 10% of the sales market?” He could not answer.  After this brief exchange I suggested him to read about goal setting. I don’t want to squash your dreams but you eat an elephant one bite at a time.

For me, I would try to understand this 9 billion dollar sales market. If there’s 10 percent of that 9 billion, let’s hope that’s just in Florida which you never know. So say it’s 900 million. O.K. , great. How much do I want to achieve in my first year that I can handle and service while creating great customer experiences?  How much can I output? How can I produce? How can I get talented people? When would I need to hire? What are my milestones? You need all those pieces but let’s skip that for a different subject. Let’s go back into that there’s 900 million in Florida. What of that can you handle? I mean, I can’t imagine him not being happy with one million dollars in revenue for now. So that’s 1 % of 1% or .000111 percentage of the Florida sales market. What will be the average sale?

Sales Market Share: Remember This!!! You do not create new clients or customers you take them from your competition!

O.K., Once your sales gets going in the market and you do a great job and your product or service is creating great experiences, it starts selling itself. There’s a story of these young kids in college that developed a platform for people to talk to each other, share pictures, experiences and so forth. It started out only for Harvard students, then colleges in the Boston area and Ivy league schools. At the end of the day, it was a success but you know, they did not try going after everybody in the world or start off with everybody in the world. They just thought it was a good concept for their college. They did a great job and because of the phenomenal viral effect, that company is  Facebook. Now, they are worldwide but they did not start off to be that way. Most guys don’t.

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