Managing Sales in Turbulent Times
Recent economic and political events have made people anxious about their futures. A business manager’s natural response is to cut costs and encourage sales reps to work harder to close sales. Trying to keep a tighter reign, managers get more involved in closing deals and demand more up to the minute reporting from their sales teams.
Most people don’t like being sold at the best of times. When times are stressful, they turn off, hang up and slam shut. But what people want at all times is value creation — that is, solutions that help them.
In an effort to defend themselves, managers tend to resort to four activities that seem to be the right thing to do during turbulent times:
- They encourage their sales teams to make more calls. The thinking here is that more activity is bound to yield more business.
- They have salespeople devote extra time to chase new business: we need new clients to replace our current losses.
- They track all sales activities. They want more information to make sure everyone is working.
- Managers get more involved in closing deals–they want to make sure that opportunities aren’t lost.
All these strategies seem to make sense, but knee jerk reactions may not be the wisest strategy. Let’s take a closer look:
- Make more calls? More calls will yield more business, but typically the business will be one-off, simple projects. So more calls may mean more deals, but not necessarily more revenue. The kind of opportunities that create high revenue require long term thinking and planning, not quick hits.
- Chase new business? Unfortunately the time required to chase new business tends to be at the expense of old business. Pay serious attention to existing clients and reconnect with past ones. Don’t sacrifice existing relationships for the sake of chasing new ones. In stressful times buyers are not more price sensitive, they are more risk averse. They are afraid to try something new and will return to reliable quality providers.
- Track all sales activities? More reporting distracts sales reps from focusing their energy on creating value. The focus of most sales activity tracking systems is after the fact, reporting on what has already happened. Rather, you want your sales team focusing on sales planning and strategic thinking to create better sales calls.
- Managers get more involved in closing deals? Having the manager do the selling erodes the confidence of the salesperson and places the client monkey on the manager’s back. Typically managers come in at the end to close, where there is little chance to add value.
The key then during turbulent times is to make sure salespeople are adding and creating value at every stage of the sales cycle. What is value? Value is simply benefits less costs. Value is something the customer is willing to pay for. Are your sales calls so value rich that your customer would be willing to pay for them?
Devoting more time and energy to strategy, planning and value creation to reduce the client’s risk will result in increased revenue and margins for the seller company. These crazy, stressful, turbulent times creates two options in a selling organization — we’re going to do better or we’re going to do worse.
