Like some kind of fox, May has snuck away and turned into June, and the summer months are upon us. That’s more than 40% of the year now behind us.
Remove two weeks for vacation and three weeks for the November-December holidays, and less than half of the year’s working weeks remain!
How are your sales numbers?
Have you generated the growth you were looking for so far this year?
For many of my clients, who mostly manufacture and distribute products, as well as provide professional services, business gets busier in these warmer months. The phone rings more. Orders come in.
It’s a perfect recipe for reactive order-taking:
You’re very busy. Customers are asking for pricing and product. Help one customer, put down the phone, and the next customer makes it ring again. It’s all you can do to keep up.
It’s easy to give in to the urge to run from one order-taking conversation to the next.
Do not give in to this reactivity.
Tell people about additional products and services you can help them with.
And ask them what else is coming up for them, so that you can fill your pipeline for the times that are less busy than these weeks.
On top of all of this — the economy has changed, and a slowdown is upon most of my clients.
The overall pie for your entire industry is getting smaller.
There is likely less business in your geographic area.
This means that you will need to take market share from your competition merely to keep up with last year’s volume — however you measure growth that isn’t inflation-affected sales dollars: whether units, pounds, or new fees.
And you cannot take market share by being reactive.
In a great, inflationary, Covid economy, you can grow significantly by being reactive because prices are shooting up.
In a more normal economy, reactivity is a recipe for flat growth numbers over many years.
But in our current contracting economy, a reactive salesforce leads to decreasing revenues.
The only way to create growth in this economy is to be proactive: call customers when nothing is wrong; educate them on additional ways they can work with you; follow up on quotes; ask for referrals.
Systematically show up and be interested.
The competition isn’t. So let’s rescue your customers from this competition.
Less than half the working weeks of the year remain — let’s go help more customers more so that they can thank us with their money.
If you would like to systematically infuse proactivity into your sales organization, call me directly at 847-459-6322, or reply to this message. My clients generate 15-30% predictable new sales annually from our work together, in every economy. Let’s talk about doing this for you.