Episode #219: Is That Light At The End Of The Sales Funnel I Can See

Millions of people are being vaccinated for Covid-19. Japan, being Japan, isn’t going to accept any old tests which were not performed on Japanese people. That means that the vaccination programme in Japan is many months way from commencing and will take many more months after that to get to a 70% vaccination herd immunity stage. Covid has driven people home to work there to avoid potential contact with carriers and superspreaders of the virus. For a lot of tasks that probably works just fine and dandy, but sales isn’t one of them.

Salespeople in Japan, even at the best of times, with normal client availability in play, love their existing clients and are not so keen on prospecting. Going to see a client, where the relationship has been created and the trust is abundant, is the preferred conversation. Cold calling a potential new client is definitely not preferred. Covid has effectively reduced salespeople to their base of existing clients, with almost no ability to add new clients into the mix.

Do we just reduce our business down to existing clients and hold our breath for the Suga san 4th cavalry to ride over the sandhill, waving a syringe in his hand to inoculate and save us? Effectively, for many companies, this breath holding exercise is what they have been doing these last nine months or so. Exhausting all of the existing client business leaves a big hole in the sale funnel and the prospects for a vaccine led sales recovery are still off in the dim, distant future.

Are we going into 2021 with more of the same? There are really only four options. One is wait for the vaccine to become readily available to allow salespeople to get back into the field and visit clients for face to face meetings. A type of back to the future approach. A second one is to hunker down with the existing clients and try and squeeze out any residue demand, all the while praying for the vaccine arrival to come soon. This is the “what the hell” approach. A third one is to flickpass the ball to marketing. Pump more money into brand building and special offer generation, to drive inbound request contacts. The people we want to speak with will call us, under this model. This is the “deep pockets” approach. The fourth one is the DDay approach of storming the beaches. Have the salespeople run straight at the mounted machine guns of cold calling, risking evisceration and obliteration by the gatekeepers.

After nine months of calling existing clients and emptying that well of any new business, salespeople now have a lot of spare time on their hands. We can’t send them into the jaws of sales death without some prep though. In the new year, take some time to spend with the salespeople to strengthen their cold calling abilities. Take the time to draw up the lists of target companies. This could be the group who are doppelgangers for your existing clients from the same industry, but not yet a client. Or they may be just successful companies, big enough to ride out Covid-19 and be ready to come roaring back, both guns blazing. You can help them with the both guns blazing bit.

Have salespeople call companies and then closely track what they hear. Do they get the brushoff immediately, being told “we are not entertaining the thought of any new suppliers at this time”. Or, “we have no money to do anything new at this point”. These types of pushbacks need to be worked on to help salespeople get past that person and talk with a decision maker, someone with a broader, more strategic view of the business. Are they getting the typical “they are not a their desk now” brush off?. We need to work on responses from salespeople on how to handle these efforts to pitch us off the cliff and into the boiling sea and foamy waves of destruction.

Will these genius comebacks get us transferred through to the decision maker? Will the gatekeeper cheerfully hand over the key person’s mobile number or email address? Usually no. That means two things. We need to do better in designing and practicising our initial explanation of why the key decision maker needs to talk to us and talk to us right now. It also requires us to keep calling back until they are in or they do call us back.