Welcome to a new column I will be sharing with you each Friday.
My goal is to share in a concise way a critical insight I’m seeing from my perspective as I meet and discuss with senior level leaders each week.
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During the last several weeks, I’ve had multiple discussions with senior managers in both sales and marketing regarding concerns about a flat market. Despite a flat market, shareholders are still looking for growth in topline sales.
A flat market should never be used as an excuse for not growing the business. (We’ve all seen how the market has punished companies that have attempted to use this excuse.)
Building the Business in a Flat Market:
Below are 4 things I believe are the best ways to build sales in a flat market that do not involved discounting prices or making an acquisition.
Shorten the prospecting process.
Key is in moving the prospect to customer as fast as possible. This means assessing the following 3 areas: Identifying prospects, qualifying prospects and identifying business opportunities.
Develop quick engagement methodologies of both product and process.
Entails streamlining product offerings and the process to get them into the customer’s hands.
Leverage vertical adjacencies.
Identify and capitalize on them in 3 areas: current products, existing customers and industries you’re currently operating in.
Shift sales resources.
Allocate more resources to prospecting and the development of new opportunities vs. maintaining existing business.
In every business, there are long-term solutions to building the business, but the time it can take to execute them can simply be too long for shareholders to accept.
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Copyright 2015, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.
