“We forgot to sell”

Optimum Ventas – “We forgot to sell”

Customers don’t call me – few customers come through the point of sale

The crisis has revealed the deficiencies of our sales teams.After more than a decade of prosperity, where customers grew and grew, where the problem was to attend all the demand generated by them, all of a sudden, they have stopped buying, at least, with the intensity made until now.

How we adapt ourselves to a new situation?

The truth is that bad…

The creativity of the sales teams has been left behind; we don’t know how to respond to new situations.
We try to apply old solutions of markets in a buying situation, to markets where to sell.

Until the beginning of the crisis, customers were buying under the criteria of “increased productivity”, “best performance”, etc. … and companies have equipped our sales teams of plot axes basing ourselves, like it couldn’t be otherwise, in these arguments, or put it another way, of these needs expressed by customers.

However, when the sales of our clients have been reduced, there has been an effect where these arguments have neither the strength nor the consistency they had.

“Why I want my factories to produce more if my productivity rate is 40% my capability”.

What do we do, how we respond to this?

Moreover, the trends have changed, where the price had a relative importance, now is a key factor. You have to argue, no longer the product and its benefits, but why pay more for our product, where the value added until now, has ceased to be.

What happened?

Many sales teams have abandoned good habits: Prospecting continues.

Why look for clients with all the work that give me the ones I have?

We hear this more often than we want. And this situation was sustainable in a market demand, with growth, as we had until mid-2007.

It is been over six years of adverse conditions and we still think that customers will come back… that once they begin to grow, we will also grow.

The ones that work with all kinds of companies have seen how some of their sales teams have complained about the situation experienced, but have grown stronger in their offices, defending and entrenching themselves, in many cases, on the new customer requirements.

Meanwhile, a small group of professionals have analyzed further and have put all the requirements to “mitigate” an adverse situation.

While some businesses have closed for lack of sales, others have sought new markets; many of them abroad, other have even innovated, but in any case, looking for new clients.
Something so obvious and so difficult to assume to countless sales teams involved in a continuous catharsis, from which they are unable to leave.

We have seen that, to compensate for the loss of customers, they have increased sales in the existing customers, reaching quotas really complicated to maintain and always with a significant cost in the margin of the company, but what is worse, a concentration of risk that no company can assume.
Increasing sales by reducing participation.

This is the key to success. To the extent that we are able to introduce new customers to our client platforms, we are able to sell a small part of their potential, we are guaranteeing the future.
To do this, we need to recover the healthy, though laborious, habit of prospecting.

In our experience working with our clients’ sales teams, we have seen how this work, vital to any commercial organization, not only has failed, but they do not know how to do it. Having teams that have failed to ever make it and where the situation of their companies is the result of an inaction prospecting.

“This prospecting does not work, I have called 30 companies and they have not taken the phone / have not wanted to answer”.

This is a standard answer from the salesperson.

We are aware that out of every 10 proposals that we make, we close a percentage of them, that out of every 10 sales interviews, we present proposals on a percentage of them, but we fail to understand that to get a new customer, we have to call a larger number of companies.
Any excuse, any job has priority over prospecting. Our teams tend to focus on the short term, given up the main task of the salesperson, which justifies his job, which guarantees the future in the medium and long term and what is worse … we have forgotten that prospecting is part of the sales process, which is the first step, without which all others are meaningless.

Juan Méndez
Associate consultant