Is Your Sales Team Ready for a Downturn?
Your VP of Sales presenting the pipeline forecast at the next quarterly meeting

Is Your Sales Team Ready for a Downturn?

This is a piece from my monthly email newsletter focused on strengthening distributed teams and growing global sales. To subscribe, click here.

I returned from a wonderful summer break to find stock markets in turmoil,?more tech layoffs and business confidence rattled. Are we heading for a recession or is this just a blip? Who knows, but whatever happens next, it's likely the sales environment will get even harder in the coming months.

How can sales professionals prepare for a sales downturn? Read on!

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?The Big Question:

What happens to sales during market downturns??

  • Budgets tighten and new decision makers take center stage
  • Inbound inquiries dry up
  • Sales cycles get longer
  • The CRM becomes more important than ever
  • Lot's more, but let's leave it here for now

The Bigger Question:

What can be done to address these challenges NOW?

Budgets Tighten and new decision makers take center stage:

During downturns, the CFO becomes king. Win over the CFO and you'll close more business. How? Revisit your key decision makers and key recommenders and re-write your messaging so that it answers this question: "What does the CFO need to see in order to buy from you?"

Inbound Inquiries Dry Up:

If your sales reps rely on inbound inquiries to hit their targets, downturns will be especially painful. Pivot your lead generation approach to outbound by re-training your team to deploy a robust system that includes the tried and tested multi-touch approach of LinkedIn, emailing, referrals and calling?and combine this with the newest A.I. sales tools.

Sales Cycles Get Longer:

On average when the economy slows, deals take longer to close. Updated messaging and more thorough outbound efforts will help counter this challenge.

There are no magic bullets, only smarter ammunition.

Consider a half-day team workshop designed to boost productivity and confidence.

This includes:

  • Updated messaging
  • Building a Multi-touch Outbound System that includes Linkedin best practices, email flows and Calling - cold & warm messaging
  • New A.I. tools to help identify, connect and communicate with prospects


I mentioned CRMs in my list at the top: The CRM becomes more important than ever.

Let's Talk About CRMs and This Unpleasant Survey Result:

I recently interviewed a number of sales reps from several high-end B2B companies. All of them used Salesforce as their CRM. Want to guess how many tracked their leads on separate spreadsheets??

82%

Yes, over 80% of these reps continue to use separate systems to track their leads. This is not only inefficient, it suggests your CRM isn't doing what it's supposed to do.

Salesforce has been around for 25 years yet most users I interviewed still track their leads on their own spreadsheet. While Salesforce, and their competitors, continue to roll out new products, it seems the initial purpose of a CRM is not being realized. Is anyone talking about this?? If so, let me know!


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For those of you who do not know me, I build sales pipelines, provide sales training and coaching and develop leadership training programs that help companies increase business across regions and prepare next-gen leaders for tomorrow's global threats and #hybridwork opportunities.

I wrote a book about the lessons learned, good, bad and ugly, when expanding into foreign markets called The Accidental Business Nomad: A Survival Guide for Working Across a Shrinking Planet. It looks at the hyper-globalization era over the last few decades and the lessons learned about working across cultures. It won the Axiom Business Book Award and has been translated into traditional Chinese.

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