Depending on your industry, times have been tough in sales. We see the Japanese Government trying to resuscitate the inbound tourism industry to increase jobs and revenues to gather more tax income. They are about to open the economy right up to stimulate business. Domestic tourism is worth about three times as much as foreign tourism contributes to the economy. There is a big kick opportunity there once Covid allows us all to travel more freely within Japan. Capital expenditures have been put on hold, as companies worry about the future of the economy. The weak currency self-selects winners and losers, so consumer spending may be impinged by inflation concerns. The kick on effect is felt across a broad range of businesses and so this may be an impediment to them opening up their purses and spending. Worries about a pending global recession driven by the war in Ukraine, energy shortfalls and supply chain issues, may also have company leaders thinking they shouldn’t start spending again and just wait and see.
Very few salespeople have been super busy over the last couple of years and most have been living a hard scrabble to produce results. This impacts our positivity and mental state about what is possible. We have also seen the numbers of active clients decrease and the volume of business deteriorate. Covid has shrunk our world and our mentality – we are mostly living small these days.
How do we adjust to a post-Covid world? Let’s be clear, the future isn’t great, as we will be alternating between bouts of the flu and Covid every year. Just like the flu, Covid will be killing off older people every year and weeks of productive work will be lost as people have to recover. Our clients will be cautious about any emergence from Covid and will be expecting the worst to happen. They have been conditioned to live small too.
We can expect that there will be pockets of client spending available to us as salespeople and our key job is going to be to identity these areas and concentrate efforts there. If a particular firm is emerging from Covid, we can expect that other firms in that same industry are doing the same thing and we need to get busy contacting as many of them as possible. Some won’t be ready but some will be ready to buy. We won’t know until we contact them. We have to keep in mind that we want to be the one having the conversation with them rather than our competitors. We will need to keep in close touch with them because at a certain point, a bell will ring and they will be back in the game. We just won’t know when that decision has been made internally, so we have to keep in touch and keep gauging the timing.
Having had no end of trouble getting hold of buyers over Covid, as everyone moved home and being blunted by the gatekeepers to the decision makers, a lot of salespeople are now gun shy about calling firms. They are sick of rejection and being treated like a nuisance, an irritant. The point to keep in mind is that this is exactly how your rivals are feeling too. If you make the effort, gird your loins and pick up the phone and call, you will have a jump on the competition. That bell will ring and it is key that we are the one to hear it and get the business, when the client is ready to come out of their cave and reengage with the world.
The prospecting muscle has atrophied during Covid and now is the time to get working on strengthening it again. Better to go early than to go late.
There will be a lot of changes inside firms as well. No one goes through a global pandemic unscathed. Whatever was the reality before, there will be changes and we need to understand how the buyer sees the world going forward. What are the new problems they are facing? Has there been any changes in how decisions are made? Have certain key people left the firm, especially our previous champion? Where did they go and can we help them in their new company? What are the firm’s immediate priorities? Is there capital to invest in expansion or recovery? Do we have the right solutions for this new world or are we imagining we just go back to how it used to be?
A lot of our assumptions and corporate intelligence may now be irrelevant, so we have to go back to basic questioning of buyers about what they now need, almost like starting over again. Have we been able to work on strengthening the value line-up of what we provide. Our workload may have declined during Covid, thereby freeing up time to work on creating added value for when it was time to re-join the battle. Did you manage that? Is there still some time to allocate resources now before things heat up again? Perhaps your early interactions with previously inactive clients have recently yielded up some hints on things you should start working on to add to your line-up of solutions. Can you take some of the friction out of your processes for your buyers? Can you increase prices by adding some extras which have perceived value when judged by the clients?
If we approach things with no presumptions, an open mind and reinvigorated flexibility, we will be able to handle whatever the market throws at us. I personally will be very happy to be back in the mud and blood of chaos and battle duking it out with my rivals for the client’s business. Let me at them!
