Hire a Rainmaker: Not all sales people are created equal, and moreover not all sales people are rainmakers. Rainmakers are the rock stars of the sales world in that they not only come with an established book of business, but they also possess the ability to create new business via their well honed professional network. Rainmakers are not merely experienced sales reps, but rather they represent the top 1% of the sales profession. These are seasoned pros that rain significant transactions like they were going out of style. One of the most important things any CEO or entrepreneur can do is recruit rainmakers. While rainmakers won’t come without a tier-one compensation plan and a significant amount of freedom, they are worth the investment. Real talent produces real results, and I’ll take a proven performer over a project eleven times out of ten.

Form a Strategic Partnership: Find companies who sell non-competitive products or services into the same vertical and form a partnership to mutually increase one another’s distribution. Joint Ventures, strategic alliances, corporate partnering, licensing and distribution agreements, and numerous other collaborative business arrangements provide an exceptional opportunity to catalyze sales growth. In addition to rapidly generating a new revenue channel the formation of key partnerships often times provides the additional advantage of creating competitive barriers to entry into certain markets or product lines.

Target Key Accounts: Few things add instant credibility and bulk revenue like being able to say that Apple, Bank of America, Disney or other name brand businesses are counted amongst your clientele. While there is considerable revenue associated with landing the big account, the real value comes in the ripple effect of being able to leverage their brand equity into increasing yours…Start by profiling and targeting key accounts with recognizable brands that will add value to your business, your revenue and your brand. Develop a sales strategy for winning the business and begin the process of landing key accounts. The sooner you start the faster you’ll find the power curve in your selling process start to shift in your favor.

Roll-up the Competition: Find competitive or synergistic businesses and target them as candidates for mergers or acquisitions. Growth by M&A can rapidly increase market share. By targeting businesses that sell into your vertical, but have a different client mix, both companies can add revenue and better manage your risk via diversification.

Develop Existing Accounts: Cross-sell and up-sell your existing clients to maximize the unmet revenue potential of your current client base. It is far more cost and time effective to increase the revenue from your existing clients than it is to develop new clients. Don’t make the mistake of overlooking the proverbial bird in hand…

Launch an Aggressive Marketing Campaign: The first five items mentioned above require you to drive the results and find the customers, whereas this tactic will drive the customers to you. A well conceived tactical marketing initiative can drive targeted results in a short time frame. An aggressive combination of PR and digital marketing can create a windfall of new business sometimes within a matter of days. For these reasons I tend to favor direct marketing campaigns that utilize digital mediums which are extremely cost effective, highly targeted, and measurable in real time.

Outsourcing Funnel Development: I am a big fan of outsourcing the front end of your sales engine…The highest and best use of your sales force is to be engaged in direct selling opportunities. If your sales people are prospecting and generating leads they are not selling. For substantially less than the cost of one fully burdened sales employee you can outsource lead generation to a firm whose sole competencey is filling the funnel for your sales staff. With this model your sales staff will now spend the overwhelming majority of their time selling as opposed to prospecting. Two side benefits of this model are that you can recruit sales people more easily when the company provides the leads, and you can also drive down your overall cost of sales by reducing your sales compensation because they are no longer required to engage throughout the entire sales cycle.