345 What Do You Do When Nothing Is Working In Sales?

<p>We hit hard times often and quickly in sales.  Deals have been done and the solutions delivered and then nothing.  The income flow of revenues suddenly dries up and the revenues attached to your name are looking very sad.  There is a monthly target or a quarterly target or both and you are not scratching.  It is embarrassing to see your name on a spreadsheet of salespeople showing the forecast for the rest of the year and you have little or no income to show for yourself in the months ahead.  In sales, there is no place to hide.  Maybe, could, possibly, hopefully, eventually are meaningless words in the word of sales.  Bosses want to see the colour of the money and are not interested in fairy stories about deals in the offing.  What do you do?  Here are some ideas:</p> <p>1.     Knuckle down and go hard seeing buyers.</p> <p>Basically, we all need to be talking to about 50 clients at any given time.  One third will do nothing, one third will do something eventually and the remainder will do something now.  If you are talking to 15 clients then that means we are left with a tiny dribble of deal flow coming through the pipeline.  We are basically fishing in a small <span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang= "EN-AU">b</span>arrel rather than in a river or an ocean and we need to be seeing more clients.</p> <p>That thought triggers a range of problems.  Who can we call?  The obvious answers are lapsed clients, orphan clients who have seen their sales rep disappear and now no one is taking care of them and new clients we have never had any contact with but who look similar to the profile of our best clients. </p> <p>Covid decimated the event business and with it networking opportunities to meet potential clients.  Finally, we are seeing networking returning and we can attend events in person and talk to potential clients in the flesh, rather than on a miserable, tiny screen in an online call.</p> <p>Many clients may have stopped buying during Covid but they may now be opening up their purse strings, as we hit a new financial yea