Episode #180: What Can You Do In A Crisis When You Can't Sell

Getting hold of clients has become very strained. Normally, we have their work number and their email, but right now they are sitting at home with just their laptop and their mobile phone. Getting hold of them can be tricky. I was unlucky the other day. I wanted to speak with the Vice President and had sent an email along those lines. Silence at the other end, so I call his company number on his business card.

The woman who answered the phone sounded like she was there answering the phone, because she was the least important person in the company. Everyone else more important was sitting safely at home. I asked to speak to the Vice President. “He isn’t here at the moment”. “Was he working from home?”. “Yes”. “How about the sales manager, is he in the office?”. “Also working from home”. “Can I have his mobile number?”. “No”. This was followed by an uncomfortable silence, as she was not offering any help to ensure the wheels of commerce could continue to turn. Now I was using their names, so it was obvious I knew them. IT didn’t matter. In frustration, I went back to sending more emails.

If you keep up with the latest news, you realise that business is grinding to a halt. Even if you do get hold of the client, there may be no capacity to purchase your solutions at the moment. In fact, they are laying people off and shutting down production capacity. So what can you do? Sending emails is fine, but very hard to convert into business in this environment. You can’t visit clients, because you and they, are all supposed to be staying at home isolating from the virus.

Cold calling might be possible, if you can get through. The difficulty of getting hold of decision makers when they are at home goes up dramatically. A few days ago, they were probably still at the office, but now they are at home following the “soft” guidance from the Government. Being Japan and everyone knowing what will happen to you, if you don’t do what the bureaucrats say, everyone slips into step and follows the directions.

So existing clients are either hard to contact or uninterested and non-clients look like staying that way for some time to come. The chance of your manager actually being able to manage you in this crisis is pretty slim. They usually can’t manage anyone in peacetime, let alone in the wartime we face today. You are at home with basically very little to do and the days become very long. Why not use this time to bolster your sales education.

I don’t mean casual listening to podcasts or watching videos. I mean full on hard core study. Really look at honing your industry knowledge and particularly your product knowledge. There are always products in the line up that you are a bit shaky on for details. Now is the time to get right across the full product line up.

We have a training grid, where we line up the customer names across one axis and the products we supply across the other axis. The number of intersections is always super revealing. They are a lot fewer than they should be. We all get shunted into pigeon holes by the buyer and we wind up only talking about a limited range of solutions when we discuss business with them. Here is the chance to be able to broaden those discussions when things get back to some semblance of normality.

Sales skills is another area that needs work and you can practice by recording your voice or videoing yourself and then playing it back and refining your delivery even further. We often become Johnny One Note, giving everyone the same basic spiel every time. All you need is your phone as far as equipment goes. Here is the chance to really customise what we can say to clients based on different situations and scenarios.

There is an astonishing amount of free education available today. I know, because I am creating it every week myself and so are a lot of other people. Having it available and getting busy really studying it are universes apart. The lazy salespeople will be binge watching multi season shows of their favourites, completely wasting their time. The smarter salespeople will see this current lull as a chance to skill up and be ready to serve clients at a higher standard, when we all get back to business.