I certainly thought we were beyond the doom and gloom economic news sometime in 2010. It seemed things were turning around and businesses were gearing up for aggressive growth in 2011.
Well, it hasn’t worked out that way. Customers that planned to hire sales people in early 2011 have now slowed or halted their plans.
The economic news this week has not been encouraging at all. Now, I’m an optimist at heart and certainly there is good news out there. I see customers in certain segments growing robustly.
Of course, sales people hear about all this from their customers every day.
And how do they respond? Well, each will respond differently but, for certain sales pipeline meetings will include reports of plans “on hold” from customers, etc.
We know that often customers use “excuses” to avoid the uncomfortable truth. Of course, that’s what separates great sales people from the rest. They know the difference. They have the skills to build relationships of trust that let them know what’s really driving the customer’s decisions.
For some sales people, for some sales teams, this bad news will take hold and make it easier to accept these put offs and excuses. And the bad news from the sales team goes up to the board and the board reports it to the analysts, the news reports it, etc. and the vicious cycle is in full swing.
How can a sales person, a sales team or a sales manager avoid all of this? How can you turn bad news into good?
Its all about the fundamentals. Its all about the sales process. In baseball, when a pitcher is off his game, the coaches take him back to the mechanics of his wind up.
Back to Mechanics, Back to Sales Process
For sales people, the mechanics are the sales process. Sales people that win in tough times are the ones that respond to bad news by rededicating themselves to the fundamentals of their sales process. And what are those fundaments?
A sales process is…
How do you find leads? Getting referrals, cold calling from a list, contacting existing or previous customers? Increase your time spent finding leads.
How do you qualify leads and identify hot prospects? Of course, expertise and focus here will minimize bad news later in the process. Ask the hard questions up front. If you’re unable to identify a strong case for the customer to make an investment with you in which you can clearly show that the benefits of the investment are so compelling that they cannot be delayed, then you may need to go back to finding more leads.
Building trust, managing the multiple influencers in a complex purchase, proposals, presentations, etc. Typically, these are the mechanics that sales people naturally focus their time on. In the later stages of the sales process, if the customer starts pulling out the excuses about plans being on hold, go back to getting more leads or go back to building a stronger case for the return on investment.
It should be a process. The more objective the decisions, the more consistently the sales team will get the mechanics right and find their way to the best prospects in any economic climate.
And how do we make the decisions clear and objective for sales people? In my experience, defining the sales process very specifically is where organizations come up short. The business leaves room in the sales process for sales people to make their own judgements and that wiggle room is where the seeds of sales pipeline doom and gloom are found.
Most business owners and sales leaders hesitate in defining a clear process because they don’t have a good way to track and measure the process. And there in is the answer. You have to start. Start tailoring your sales pipeline tracking system or online CRM to track your specific sales process. Don’t expect to get it right the first time. Just start looking at the measurements.
Use information to determine where the sales process is working and where its not. You’ll find that measuring whatever rudimentary process you have today will point the way to completely counter-intuitive improvements in the process you won’t likely see by listening to stories from sales people about customers with bad news.