We need more sales!
It feels like staring over the edge of an abyss…. “That can’t be…. nothing booked for next week?!” Usually followed by excuses, “the economy… bad leads… the pricing is too high…” The worst nightmare of an owner, operations manager, and sales professional. The reasons can be all over the map as to how it happened, but how do you get unstuck?
Immediate Action
The first response should be that all salespeople (owner and key managers included) contact current/former clients and industry relationships to get things flowing.
Great questions are:
we have a couple of gaps in our schedule next week (later this week), know anyone that needs (your product) quickly?
any projects that are ready for (your product) early?
This isn’t sustainable for every week, you are pulling some of the busiest people onto the sales floor and mortgaging next week/month’s sanity for some quick wins. But if everyone including the sales staff makes 10-20 calls over the next 2 days, you’ll be surprised at the result.
2. Proactive Pipeline Work
Once the schedule is stabilized, have a meeting with key managers on how to avoid slumps.
Avoid the temptation to brush it off as a “one-off event”. What type of efforts are needed from Marketing, Sales, and Operations in order to prevent similar results in the future? This requires looking at the recent past to determine what factors contributed to the perfect storm.
If this is a regular occurrence, you might benefit from an experienced outsider joining the conversation. A board member or coach can help steer conversations and prevent biased solutions that result in the same thing happening again and again.
Meeting outcome: 1 or 2 measurable actions with an end date, each owned by 1 individual.
3. Maintain a Scorecard
Scorecards help organizations view concerning trends and discuss and avoid or plan for concerning events.
If ownership and managers could see that outbound calls had dropped due to phone carrier changes, or that Marketing leads generated went to single digits because of an Accounting error on payables, things could be discussed and reacted to as a team.
Update the scorecard weekly. Meet and discuss if anything is concerning or working better than expected.
If this issue resonates with you and you need help implementing the solutions above. Reach out, by clicking here for a conversation you won’t regret!
