Episode #345: What Do You Do When Nothing Is Working In Sales

We hit hard times often and quickly in sales. Deals have been done and the solutions delivered and then nothing. The income flow of revenues suddenly dries up and the revenues attached to your name are looking very sad. There is a monthly target or a quarterly target or both and you are not scratching. It is embarrassing to see your name on a spreadsheet of salespeople showing the forecast for the rest of the year and you have little or no income to show for yourself in the months ahead. In sales, there is no place to hide. Maybe, could, possibly, hopefully, eventually are meaningless words in the word of sales. Bosses want to see the colour of the money and are not interested in fairy stories about deals in the offing. What do you do? Here are some ideas:

1. Knuckle down and go hard seeing buyers.

Basically, we all need to be talking to about 50 clients at any given time. One third will do nothing, one third will do something eventually and the remainder will do something now. If you are talking to 15 clients then that means we are left with a tiny dribble of deal flow coming through the pipeline. We are basically fishing in a small barrel rather than in a river or an ocean and we need to be seeing more clients.

That thought triggers a range of problems. Who can we call? The obvious answers are lapsed clients, orphan clients who have seen their sales rep disappear and now no one is taking care of them and new clients we have never had any contact with but who look similar to the profile of our best clients.

Covid decimated the event business and with it networking opportunities to meet potential clients. Finally, we are seeing networking returning and we can attend events in person and talk to potential clients in the flesh, rather than on a miserable, tiny screen in an online call.

Many clients may have stopped buying during Covid but they may now be opening up their purse strings, as we hit a new financial year. We have to make sure it is us they are talking to, when they decide to jump back into solution purchase activities. They will buy from someone, so our job is to make sure we are top of mind and tip of tongue.

2. Develop grit and tough it out

In Japan, buyers are never on your timetable. Yes, you need some revenue before the end of the month or the quarter and so what. That is what you want and clients are usually not cooperating, so get over it. You have to dig deep and find the guts to keep going regardless of how many deals fall over, how many rejections you get or any of the thousand indignities which the world of sales throws up for salespeople.

Activity is the cure for a slump. Brute strength is needed to eke out some sales. Make the cold calls, go to the events, write to clients, call lapsed buyers and keep going regardless of how miserable the results are. Poor results can wilt our will and destroy our confidence. We have to put that aside and just barrel onward until we force a break in our favour.

3. Review your sale’s techniques

We all get into bad habits. Especially when things have been going well. We tend to cut corners, shave off some of the sophistication and skip steps we should have followed. Go back to the basics and do the pre-contact research. Gather information and insights on their marketplace, their competitors and the direction of the industry. Come to the meeting armed with better quality questions based off this knowledge component.

Find out how decisions are made and see if there are people not present in the meeting whose opinion internally will have a strong influence on the due diligence. What are their concerns and what can your interlocutor do to convince them this is a good idea which should be supported?

Get together with colleagues and do some roleplay practice. This should be aimed at when the buyer tells you the price is too high, or your quality isn’t good enough or your delivery is going to take too long or the other main reasons for buyers not to proceed. In any industry or market there will be similar pushback comments and we have to be ready to handle them.

Don’t forget to make sure the first words out of your mouth are “May I ask you why you say that?” when you hit pushback. We need to get more information before we try to answer the pushback and for us to know from which angle we need to mount our defence.

Slumps, downturns, failings are the norm for salespeople and we have to face that reality. Good times are just an illusion to convince us we are good at sales. Bad times teach us hard but valuable lessons and brings us back to the reality of this harsh world we inhabit. We have to break free of the gravitational pull of giving up and collapsing mentally and physically. No matter how bad it gets, just put one foot in front of the other and keep going and going and going.