The frustration of not achieving sales target - Sales Slump

GullySales Nov 2020 revenue dropped by 90%.

In September and October 2020, we achieved consistent revenue. The drop in revenue caused a lot of concern about the performance and raised questions about whether this situation would continue into December 2020.

I conducted an audit of my actions to determine the cause of the drop. I was inundated with a lot of new sales qualified leads and I was feeling a bit tired doing the same routine work in awareness stage meetings educating prospects and account closure meetings.I decided to reduce my meeting time by spending time on sales enablement activities and automating a few of the sales process steps.

Although I fulfilled one key goal of sales enablement work, revenue dropped by 90%. After conducting an audit, I found ways to generate 200% of October 2020 revenue if we delivered certain tasks and followed up with existing clients for new project requests.

In a week's time, I was able to achieve 50% of the December 2020 target.

When I reflect upon what happened and how I achieved this performance, instead of getting into thoughts about how badly we underperformed, how bad we have been in achieving results, and that life sucks, a clear audit of sales process steps, review of the sales pipeline, and forecasting helped me reach the sales target.

Whenever there is a slump in sales, instead of getting into our heads and entertaining negative thoughts, reviewing with a peer which step of the sales process (buyer persona, prospecting, lead generation, or sales closure) we are stuck on will help us catch ourself and come up with possible actions to take.

Share your thoughts on any similar situations you may have faced in sales, and what techniques you use to recover from a sales slump.