It is possible that you are not meeting your revenue projections or experiencing cash flow challenges. Are the business conditions changing, maybe the start of an economic downturn, or has this been a slow decay of sales numbers over time? In your secret heart, you are apprehensive that business is experiencing a decline. Nevertheless, these factors may not be sufficient to suggest that your organisation is not functioning as expected.
Sales leaders need to be on the front foot when a business slowdown starts to be felt. Identifying the cause and action plan to resolve the slowdown is crucial. You must avoid basing business decisions on a gut feeling or looking for justification in other companies’ experiences. Each company’s slowdown is caused by more than one factor.
We will examine the symptoms of a business slowdown, the external factors affecting your bottom line, and seven critical steps to accelerate revenue growth.
Signs of a Slow Business
How can you determine whether business is inherently declining or if internal factors are at play that could impact your bottom line? The solution is eliminating variables as you troubleshoot from your bank account rearward. These are a few indicators of a slow business that may warrant consideration:
Decreased Revenue
This is the most significant item to verify, as it is the closest to your bank account. Contrast your revenue figures with those from previous periods: the last month to the current month, the prior quarter to the current quarter, the previous year to the current year, and the corresponding period of the previous year.
This confirms a previously identified revenue decline and its precise date of occurrence. If revenue decreases beyond the expected range or outside of the typical seasonality, you will be able to identify the cause, whether it is a slowdown in business or something else.
Decreased profitability
Alternatively, if there is no decrease in revenue, it is advisable to investigate profitability as a potential cause to determine whether the business is experiencing a slowdown. Did you hire new employees, invest in new tools or equipment, or incur additional overhead in another department?
If not, you should compare the performance of your more profitable products to those that are less impactful. It is feasible that your “money makers” are experiencing a decline in business while other offerings are either maintaining or increasing.
Pipeline is dry
The subsequent phase is to determine the cause of a decrease in revenue, which involves examining sales. Compare your sales team’s closing ratio to that of other time periods. Has the proportion of closed transactions increased or decreased?
Lower Traffic and Engagement
A decrease may suggest a problem with lower traffic to the business through marketing. If you are reliant on B2B lead generation, this can cause a decline in business. If the company has robust closing ratios, it may indicate that there are fewer deals in the market.
There are typically 5-10% live buyers in the B2B market at any time, and the balance is ‘just looking’. In slow markets, that can drop to as little as 1-2%, depending on your product. For some, it can mean 0%. An example is recruiters in the global financial crisis. No one was hiring.
Before reaching this conclusion, it is imperative that your team’s sales activity corresponds with or surpasses that of previous periods. This can also reduce the pipeline if they are not prospecting or calling as frequently.
Sales Leaders Need to Take Action
Sales leaders need to take action and secure the business during a slowdown. The objective should not be to expand rapidly but rather to improve. When your business experiences a slowdown, it is important to remember that the race is won by gradual and steady growth if you catch the decline early enough.
Revisiting your sales strategy and sales plan, or writing one if you have not already, is one of the key steps to assist the company in experiencing deliberate growth.
Our Complete Guide to Sales Planning can be a great tool for sales leadership.
Although it may appear counterproductive, your team may benefit from a business slowdown. Your time is freed up to resolve weaknesses, and the team can concentrate on prospecting and connecting with potential leads when your business is slow.
When business is growing strongly and you are hitting your numbers, it is common for sales leaders to step back and let some management functions slip. The results are coming in, and everything is working. The better the results that flow into the business, the more hands-off a leader becomes.
But in sales, the next month can always be the start of trouble, so you need to be hands-on all the time and manage through indicators and trends so you can guide the business around rough seas.
When business slows down, you must check your heartbeat and alter your sales plan to embrace the new challenges. These action points can set you in good stead.
1. Conduct a competitive analysis.
When business is slowing, conducting a sales competitive analysis can enable your salespeople to position your product during their sales calls more effectively. Your salespeople can gain insight into the competitive landscape of your product by conducting a sales competitive analysis. A competitive analysis may involve:
Examine the products or services that competitors provide to identify market gaps. Ask yourself questions such as, “Are there any gaps in their offerings?” and “Do we provide a product or service that addresses that need?” These gaps can assist your sales team in positioning your product.
Uncover market trends: If you discover that a competitor has a product or service that you do not, consider the rationale behind it. Is there a new trend arising in your field? If this is the case, evaluating how new trends complement your product line and/or disrupt your sales process may be beneficial.
Increase your sales efficiency: Analyse the methods by which your competitors are marketing their products or services. Acquire knowledge of their sales process and apply it to your own.
To perform a competitive analysis, you may respond to inquiries regarding your competitors, such as:
- What is the structure of their sales process?
- What are the channels through which they are selling?
- What is the reason for consumers’ decision not to purchase from them?
- What is the source of their revenue?
- What are the appearances of their products or programmes?
- Do they partner with others?
In times of a business slowdown, comprehending your product’s comparative strengths and weaknesses to those of your competitors can assist you in devising strategies for future success and expansion.
2. Create a resilient sales strategy.
In order to foresee the future, developing a sales strategy or modifying the existing one is imperative. How are you going to market? Can you change the structure or focus of sales teams to better compete in the market?
It is advantageous to evaluate your sales strategies during periods of minimal business activity to formulate deliberate, steady expansion strategies.
If you do not already have one, your sales plan should specify the sales strategies for your team, including objectives, tactics, target audience, and potential obstacles.
3. Ensure that your marketing and sales strategies are in harmony.
Sales and marketing are intrinsically interwoven; however, they frequently operate to different goals. This misalignment can result in significant repercussions, such as gaps in the buyer’s journey, wasted budgets, and missed revenue. Sales leaders are responsible for leading the direction of marketing as the sales plan sets the plan for new markets, products and services, and customer retention.
Sales and marketing alignment is not an instantaneous process; however, it is a worthwhile endeavour. Salespeople who are employed by organisations that have aligned teams exhibit superior performance. Sales teams report that the alignment greatly enhances lead quality.
You must collaborate with your marketing team as a sales leader to generate prospects. Additionally, it is recommended that you provide marketing with information regarding prevalent customer enquiries and sore points, as this can enhance their strategy and approach.
4. Examine your CRM.
CRM is now the centre of information for team management if you have it set up correctly. The first step is to evaluate the efficiency of your sales team and analyse the contacts in your CRM. Review the customer profiles to see whether they match your target audience in your sales plan.
Are the company size, location, and vertical of all their prospects and clients the right profile? These specifics are crucial for the company’s short-medium-long term growth and profitability.
As a sales leader, you must monitor your team’s performance by putting the data in your CRM to work for you. You should be able to compare your team members’ average sales cycle length. What is the ratio of close-win agreements to close-lose deals?
To facilitate the monitoring of your team’s performance, it is possible to establish a dashboard and monitor metrics such as:
- Activity Sales Metrics
- Pipeline Sales Metrics
- Sales Metrics for Lead Generation
- Metrics for Sales Outreach
- Sales Metrics for Primary Conversion
- Channel Sales Metrics
- Sales Productivity Metrics
- Metrics for Rep Hiring and Onboarding
- Adoption Metrics for Sales Process, Tool, and Training
By utilising these analytics, you can make informed decisions for your team. This is where a sales operations specialist in your team can be a highly valuable member, providing sales leaders with the right information in a timely manner.
This is the heartbeat of the business, and where gaps are not being coached continually, you can unnecessarily expose the business to a slowdown.
5. Review the sales capability of the team.
It may be necessary to reevaluate your training and coaching initiatives if your salespeople continue to miss objectives. Although training is essential for preparing your team for success, most organisations adopt an informal approach, which typically concludes upon the completion of induction.
In your capacity as a sales leader, it is important to consider the following inquiries:
- Are your junior-level employees commencing their careers on a solid foundation, or would they benefit from additional training?
- Are your more experienced sellers informed about the most recent technologies and strategies? Have their skills been increased to match more complex audiences they may now be selling to?
- What areas require the most development, such as nurturing and prospecting?
The revisiting of sales methodologies should be high on the agenda for sales leaders. A solid platform creating a common language and way of selling for your company. Consistency in how the sales process is applied to customers directly impacts metrics, pipeline, and revenue achievement.
Sales Focus Coaching Programmes are designed to support sales leaders in accelerating sales.
5. Refine systems and procedures.
Your sales team must have a well-defined system and process to succeed in the sales process. What is the method by which your sales team manages their prospects? What techniques do they employ to oversee the transactions in their pipeline?
A sound sales playbook is instrumental in assisting salespeople to stay focused on best practices for their business and how customers are prospected and managed.
Analyse your sales process by observing your representatives. Ask yourself questions such as, “What is the overall structure of their deals?” or “How much time has passed between each step?”
After examining the process, consider the factors that influence the progression of prospects from one stage to the next. Analysing what is effective and what is not can be achieved by comprehensively understanding your sales system.
6. Formulate a sales enablement strategy.
Sales enablement is the process of equipping your representatives with the necessary resources to complete more deals. For example, marketing can furnish representatives with various content to improve their interactions with prospects, such as blogs, product guides, and videos.
Conversely, sales can engage in dialogue with marketing regarding the lack of content that could be advantageous to leads during their excursions.
7. Sales coaching is a powerful tool for sales leaders.
Sales coaching is one of the most powerful tools a sales leader can use when a business slowdown is being experienced. It provides you with direct feedback on the performance of your sales team members and the market’s response to your offering.
The best sales teams are coached continuously to a proven sales methodology. The reinforcement occurs in sales meetings, field trips, customer visits and general communication. Those sales leaders close to the conversation between buyers and sellers are the most likely to steer through rough times successfully.
Establish your objectives.
After working through the steps outlined, you will be well-positioned to start taking action to
By revisiting your sales strategy and sales plan or writing one if you have not already, you are well set to assist the company in experiencing deliberate growth. You will have a set of priorities, such as training the team, coaching in the field, and sales and marketing alignment, that are all focused on delivering revised plan results.
Your sales team may benefit from a slowdown in business. You have the opportunity to utilise this period to enhance your skills and devise strategies for boosting your revenue in the future.
If you have let too much time pass before addressing the business slowdown, you may also need to consider a sales transformation. A transformation that may see wholesale changes to how the business goes to market to address the declining revenue and profitability.
As experts in sales organisations, Sales Focus Advisory can assist you in developing the right strategy and implementation plan for your business.
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You may also be interested in reading these articles:
- Successfully Responding To The New Sales Environment
- The Stage of Your Sales Organisation Affects Its Results
- Actions CEOs Take When Business Results Fail
- The Ultimate Guide to Writing Sales Strategy
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