What do you do when sales dry up?
Sometimes, it’s quicker and easier to find someone to blame than it is to get to the root of the problem. However, apportioning blame will not fix the problem and you will waste a lot of time and effort getting into arguments about it. It’s better to use those energies in identifying exactly where your pipeline is failing and nip it in the bud as soon as possible.
So how do you go about doing this?
Well, first of all you need to check your pipeline for leaks and these could arise from anywhere. Typically though, these leaks tend to surface in the following areas:
Your data
Do you have the right data, enough of it and is it appropriate for your sales proposition? Often, the data you’re working with can be at the root of the problem and you’re spending too long wading through it trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. The data needs to be cleansed, sufficient in volume for you to achieve the conversions you need and it needs to be in the relevant sectors that potentially may have a need for your product or service. If it isn’t, then you need to feed this back to your marketing and data management teams so that they can investigate further.
Decision Makers
As sales people, we all know how important it is to be speaking to the right people and not be wasting time going around the houses trying to find the person who can actually make the decisions. Your sales teams can waste a lot of time tracking down the right person to talk to so if your pipeline is being clogged up, this may be one of the problems. Make sure that you’re targeting the correct decision makers and if you’re being fed the wrong people, then highlight this problem so that it can be resolved.
Background
Do you have enough background about the customers you’re contacting or too little? Sometimes a sales approach can be too generic to make the right impact so your proposition needs to be more tailored and your data appropriately targeted. Conversely, you can spend too much time trying to get too much detail about your customers before making contact and this will slow down the sales process. There is a balance to be struck here and you should sit down with your sales teams and engage marketing so that you can determine what would be the best and optimum approach.
Throwing in the towel
Are you throwing in the towel too easily? We know how easy it is to get disheartened when sales aren’t happening and it’s quite easy to get stuck in a rut when this starts to happen. If this is happening then you all need to remind yourselves that most leads convert after around 5 to 12 touches so perseverance is the name of the game. Just because a customer says no now, doesn’t mean that in 6 months time they won’t feel differently. This is why it’s important to nurture those undecided customers with occasional emails and other marketing activity that provides added value. By doing this, you will be front of mind when they finally have a need for your product or service.
Retention
Are you simply losing too many customers (who then aren’t coming back) and may be giving you a bad name? This is where you need to take samples of the customers you’ve lost and tentatively try and find out the reasons why this is the case. It’s sensible to work with marketing on this to see if any research can be carried out on lapsed customers to see if there are any patterns or trends.
You will notice that we've mentioned working with marketing to help identify any problems with your sales pipeline. In many organisations sales and marketing often butt heads over situations like this, but it makes a lot more sense to work with marketing and not against them. At the end of the day you are all trying to reach the same objectives so if you can get marketing on your side, you will not only plug the leaks quicker but you will also stop the same problems from repeating themselves in the future.
