Episode #312: Hope Is Not A Strategy In Sales

When you are told that “hope is not a strategy” you get the point. You also know that actually there is a fair bit of hope built into your strategy. Every sales organisation comes up with targets and often these are based on hope more than science. There is imperfect information floating around and we use this as the basis of our assumptions. There is incomplete data and we have to extrapolate based on those numbers. Things can change quickly and the ramifications can be completely unexpected. January 15th, 2020 was the first case of Covid in Japan. February 23rd, 2022 was the start of the war in Ukraine. You couldn’t predict these events and there is a huge amount of hope that both situations will resolve themselves and we can all get back to some version of normality.

We say things like, “let’s focus on what we can control”. That is jolly heart warming but it isn’t much help. There are numbers which have to be generated and these have to be produced regardless of external factors, most of which we cannot control. This whole ensemble of difficulties can be very discombobulating in sales. If we are set targets too high, we mentally check out and give up. We don't make any declarations to the boss that we have given up, but our activities are such that we are not doing all we can to get the numbers, because we don’t believe in the fairness of the process.

If you are the boss, the management of the sales operation gets more and more difficult in the work from home or hybrid arrangement. Keeping track of what people are up to gets harder. Our expectations have to be tempered by the external environment, be that Covid or the global downturn. The numbers get harder to reach. If we push too hard, people will quit and they will have little issue with finding another job, if they decide they don’t like this one. The whole process becomes more delicate and complex at the same time.

If we take a long hard look at our strategy and we realise there is a fair bit of hope built in there what do we do about it? Not every industry or sector is affected by Covid, the war in the Ukraine or a global downturn. Are there pockets of opportunity in certain spheres where they can still spend? The timing of things may be faster in some sectors than others. If we can get deals happening faster, then that helps a lot with getting to the targets. Often we just run out of time, because the speed of the deal flow has ground to a halt or has really slowed down.

Can we re-organise the sales team? We can create smaller teams, apply more supervision and have more roundtables, to share information and insights. In good times the team can be allowed to run around at will, because the numbers are being achieved. When things get more desperate and the numbers are not coming, we need to do more coaching and more checking. Often circumstances can outstrip the experience of certain members in the sales team. The Lehman Shock was back in 2008 and there will be team members who have had no direct experience of doing business during that meltdown environment. Anyone in sales under the age of thirty-six hasn’t suffered through a major downturn since Lehman. This is where the more experienced people become important because they have seen a version of what we are going through now, at some stage in the past and have experience of what to do.

We all have dead pools of clients who have lapsed. They were active but situations changed and they are no longer a client. They are a good place to start because they at least have some record of buying from us. We may still be an accredited supplier for them and the paperwork is already there to make the buying process that bit easier. Often the people will have changed, but the underlying issues may not have been completely solved or new issues have arisen and we have the solution they need.

We may have served one client but there will be other similar clients we have not had the chance to do business with. If we come across an issue in one industry it is often going to be a common issue with other companies in the same industry. If we find a problem for one client we need to look around at which other firms may have the same issues. For example a five star Hotel may be having trouble with retention. There is a strong chance other five star hotels are having the same problem. That means we should start contacting all the major hotels and see if that is the case.

Gradually we can replace hope with action and try to stimulate the sales process in that way. The key is to get started and to not just become immobilised because the hope aspect of your strategy is not working out.