The Selling In A Downturn Checklist
A sales improvement to-do list designed for when times get tough
What You Can Do When Nobody Is Buying
We covered a lot in my interview with the Challenger team a few weeks ago. Challenger’s CEO, Andee Harris, asked me a bunch of great questions, but the best one might have been this:
What should sales teams be doing differently in an economic downturn?
Here’s a list — a semi-organized collection of the stuff you should at least think about doing when selling starts to feel just a little bit harder.
Remove The Excuses
There’s an old-world mafia saying that translates to “Before you begin your journey, take the rock out of your shoe.” When the going gets tough, you need to avoid unforced errors. It’s time to take at least a few rocks out of your shoe. Maybe you’ve never gotten around to nailing an actual target account list. Maybe your sales stages need to be refreshed. Maybe your team is still missing that one-pager they keep asking for. Maybe your demo is still snooze-fest. You know that thing you haven’t gotten around to fixing yet, but you know you should? It’s time. If you don’t, your team will use it as an excuse. You can’t afford excuses right now. Show that you’re willing to change things and your team will feel the urgency and follow suit. Leave things to complain about and… well, you know what happens next.
Buy (And Use) Some Cadencing Software
You’re going to need some more pipeline this year. Potentially a lot more. Chances are your sales team isn’t prospecting as much as they should. Give your people a tool that makes it easier to get a meeting booked. Even if your reply rates are low, semi-automated outbound that doesn’t suck keeps you top-of-mind. It’s a sneaky way to build awareness (and honestly kind of fun to set up).
Optimize Your PPC
Every time a paid click goes to someone’s poorly designed website homepage, someone somewhere punches a kitten. Let’s save some kittens. Build some landing pages that you’re proud of and that deliver on what your ad promises. Track your conversion rate. If it’s less than 2%, you can likely make some simple changes that make a big difference. Look at this library of quality landing pages and steal from it. Measure the results every week. And please, please, please make sure you’re following up on leads quickly. Your response time should be measured in minutes, not days. This is low-hanging fruit. People buy things from companies that are responsive. Dig into how long it takes you to respond to a lead. The results might shock you.
Shorten Your Operating Cycle
I was talking to a CRO of one of our recently-exited portfolio companies the other day and I asked him — “What’s the most helpful thing we did for you and the team?” His answer: “You forced us to look at the data every week.” Get into an analytical rhythm. Create a scoreboard and look at whether you’re winning or losing. Take stances. Fix stuff. Not every board meeting. Not every month. Every week. This doesn’t just make your business better. The momentum feels good.
Expect “Pump The Brakes” Moments
We all experience it: That point in a deal when you feel like it’s going well and then things. Just. Stop. That pump-the-brakes moment is going to happen more often, not less, in a downturn. People run into CFOs, procurement, and the reality of how hard change actually is. You need to expect the momentum to slow, and you need to have a tool and a talk-track to address it. We talk on this episode about the “buyer’s guide” that I like to build for this exact moment — I’ll plan to do a future post on how to put one of these together. In the meantime, there’s plenty in the episode to get you started.
Know If You’re Going To Miss
“The simplest way to have better conversations about the forecast is to have more than one forecast to talk about.” This is the time to institute some rigor around how you call your number. Pipeline coverage isn’t enough. You need another lens on how you’re tracking and where (based on historical data) you can expect to land. There’s a step-by-step guide and an excel template in this article. Use it.
Tap Prospects Who Already Know You
If you haven’t pulled a list of closed-lost deals from the last two years and reached out with some version of the message “…How about now?” you are making a mistake. Look for opportunities to get back in touch with people who’ve already expressed some modicum of interest. A warm re-intro beats a cold call every day of the week.
Give Your Pitch Deck + Demo a Facelift
Are you proud of what your salespeople are presenting? Do you know? Block an afternoon, order lunch, and listen to some Gong calls or ask your team to show you what they share in a first meeting. You will be productively horrified. But good news! Without even trying just built your training, enablement, and reinforcement plan for the next 3 months. (Pro tip: Do this every 3–6 months until you retire.)
Look at Historical Rep Performance
Most teams never run an analysis on who their best salespeople are and whether their new ones are ramping yet. Don’t be like most teams. Figure out what a fully ramped sales rep should be producing, and then measure who’s ahead and who’s behind. Bonus points for taking a hard look at the pipeline you’re still allowed to be managed (mismanaged?) by the people who have never quite hit their stride.
Ask Your ELT to Boost Your Content
Your marketing team is churning out blog posts, white papers, webinars, and other marketing stuff right? The members of your ELT probably have a few thousand LinkedIn followers each, right? See where I’m going? Pull out your marketing calendar, send a few calendar invites to your ELT, and ask them to repost with a few short thoughts when you publish your next few pieces of content. This extends reach, humanizes your messaging, gets your ELT members out in front of customers (without the expense of a plane ticket) and forces your leaders to pay just a little more attention to what the marketing department is doing.
So there you go. There’s lots more you can do to improve your chances for growth. But that’s not a bad list of where you can start.
10 points for each suggestion you actually implement.
Don’t try to do everything on this list at once. Just get out there and find a way to put 30 points on the board.
(Your competitors probably won’t.)