As a tough economy lingers, many small-business owners find themselves stuck in a sales slump that just doesn’t seem to get any better. Under those conditions, it’s easy for a business to find itself floundering for solutions that seem perpetually out of reach.
“Many businesses are paralyzed in today’s difficult and increasingly competitive economy,” David Mattson, CEO of Sandler Training, who helps businesses with just such problems. Here are sales slump survival tactics that can make your business stronger for the year ahead:
• Stick with your sales process. When sales slow, many small-business owners panic. They suddenly forget what they know and start throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks. They jump from activity to activity, neglecting their sales process.
• Don’t focus on revenue only. Focusing only on top-line numbers can frustrate a sales team. What you really need to consider is behavior as well as revenue. To achieve your sales goals, your business needs to know which behaviors need to take place in order to provide favorable sales results down the road.
• Keep prospecting. If you only pay attention to current customers you will sacrifice long-term sales. When a business gets to a certain size, employees feel like they can relax and that they are past needing to prospect all the time. Don’t fall for this trap.
• Maintain marketing and advertising. When businesses see a decrease in sales, the first costs they tend to cut are marketing and advertising. That’s a mistake. Now more than ever small companies must create mind-share with customers and prospects. But it doesn’t have to cost money. An often missed opportunity is simply following up on all leads you receive.
• Ban “Loser Talk.” If you really want to kill sales, create an atmosphere of learned helplessness. In fact, many business owners do this and don’t even realize what they’ve done. Stop blaming the economy or other things out of your control, and set a positive tone going forward.
• Remember your roots. If you want to drive a business into the ground, forget what you did that made the business successful in the first place. Remember what made clients and prospects fall in love with your company; then go back to that.
• Plan for seasonal slowdowns. Planning ahead for seasonal slowdowns can help pull you out of future ruts. Leaders should anticipate specific months or times of year when sales trend down and feed the sales funnel before these occur. •
Daniel Kehrer can be reached at
editor@business.com.
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