During the speaker’s dinner on the evening prior to the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference, I asked our 20 presenters and panelists the following two questions:
1. How has the economy affected your business?
2. What is your plan of action?
Their answers were insightful, inspiring, and illuminating, reflecting the intelligence drawn from a collective 300 years of experience leading sales teams. Here are some of the nuggets we collected.
1. Negative headlines create fear and anxiety. This is not the time to crawl under the desk and suck our thumbs. Our role as sales leaders is to help salespeople translate fear into energy It’s time to remember our core mission, and it’s time to raise our heads and pursue more audacious goals.
2. We need to adjust our strategy. Many sales managers ask their salespeople to double their call volume, but the reps then end up doing only half their job with twice as many prospects. It is far better to call on fewer but more qualified prospects and create a deeper connection and deliver more value. One sales manager insisted on deleting 25 percent of the company’s prospect database, saying, “We need to stop chasing garbage trucks.”
3. We need to shore up our balance sheet, lower the cost of doing business. Trim the fat, but don’t cut the muscle.
4. This isn’t the time to lower our price. If we cut price, we look like we’re having a fire sale. The best strategy is to lower the risk of buying.
5. Sales leaders must over-communicate that they have confidence in their team
and confidence that the market will return to normal, that the world is not
coming to an end, and that job security comes from creating happy customers.
6. This is the time to improve everything: people, processes, and technology.
Sales will improve with better training and coaching. Sales will improve with
better processes. Sales will accelerate with better technology. The worse the
economy gets, the harder we need to work on improving our business.
7. This is the time to get on the offensive. We cannot control the market, but we can control how aggressively we approach our market. As one VP of sales said, “This is the time to rip our competitors’ hearts out.”
8. Tough times will test our leadership. Effective sales leaders will lavish praise on their people for performing at peak levels. At the same time, sales leaders — always ready to improve everything and always determined to expect better results in the future — will express chronic dissatisfaction with the status quo.
9. We need to reassure our star performers that their jobs are safe and their bonus potential will be high even though their results may be lower.
10. We need to focus on our customers, respond to their new requirements, and uncover new opportunities.
11. We as sales leaders need to improve our mindset, for all eyes are on us. The economy may empty our pockets, but it cannot empty our spirits.
Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher
gg @sellingpower.com
November/December 2008 Selling Power
