Sharpen your sales skills - Selling in a recession

Colly Graham of Salesxcellence offers some tips on Selling in a recession

Once people believe there is going to be a recession they start to feel negative about their selling prospects.

Do you have a clearly defined Sales Strategy?

A Sales Strategy is basically a calculated and tactical plan for acquiring new business, growing existing business and making and exceeding the company sales quota. As in all good plans you need to begin with the end in mind. What is it you want to achieve - be specific? Knowing what you want to achieve will allow you to formulate the necessary steps to achieve the results you are seeking.

• How Much?
• By When?

There are four basic parts of a sales strategy:
1. New business acquisition
2. New business acquisition tactics
3. Existing business growth strategies
4. Existing business growth tactics

Four Parts of the Plan
Sales Quota: This critical element of plan sets the tempo of efforts throughout the year and provides quarterly, monthly, weekly and even daily sub-goals for you to achieve.

Sales Territory: Refers to the geographic area, list of named accounts or specific market niche you have been assigned to in which you are to sell products, services and solutions.

Strategy: The plan necessary to accomplish the company's sales' goal

Tactics: The steps necessary to carry out the plan.
Analyse your existing customers - who has not bought in the last three to six months - go after them and bring them back into the fold.

Stop being a hunter and become a farmer - look at the activities of the farmer and apply it to your accounts.

With the farmer concept, you look upon your accounts the way a farmer would look at his land. The farmer cultivates, prepares, plants, seeds, waters, fertilises, weeds, protects, grows, develops crops, harvests and then starts the cycle all over again.

1. Cultivating - learning as much about your customer as possible to discover opportunities to see what you need to plant so that you can harvest the results.
2. Preparation - putting yourself in a better position to service the customer, building your relationship to understand his business at depth, asking questions to uncover and discover further opportunities.
3. Planting - using your skills as a problem solver to offer solutions for the further problems you have uncovered within the account. Helping the customer realise that he has further problems that you can solve.
4. Seeding - demonstrating how you can solve this problem.
5. Watering and Fertilising- showing how other customers have benefited by placing further business with you
6. Weeding - keeping your competitors out of your accounts.
7. Harvesting - requires that you get further business from the existing customer - you get more sales!
8. Continuous Harvesting - requires that you maintain excellent customer relations

And finally build and strength your relationships with your customers.
Build a relationship of mutual trust and respect with clients through rapport. Protect your accounts from competitors by adding value to the relationship by identifying opportunities that have a positive impact on their business. Today's customers have become more sophisticated and demanding of higher levels of customer service than ever before. They want someone they can trust who understands their needs and wants.
Customer loyalty should be what we seek to give rather than what we seek to get.
As Zig Ziglar is famous for saying, "You can get anything you want in life if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

Businesses Growing Despite Recession with Sales Training

Colly Graham, CEO of salesxcellence, with over forty years experience in sales and business start-ups, says companies who are thriving and surviving the recession are focusing on their sales strengths and deploying sales training to grow sales.

salesxcellence is experiencing an increasing demand for solution based sales training from businesses who see the recession as an opportunity to win business and grow sales.

Colly says, yes you can grow in a recession, past recessions companies who focussed on growing and strengthening their sales teams through sales management and sales training have watched their profits grow. Colly continued to say managing and focussing on your key customers in tough times is the way forward in tough times. Define where the top 20% of your profit is coming from and focus on building a closer relationship with these accounts.

Referrals from top customers will win business from your competitors start asking to be referred and give your customers referrals to help them grow.

Identify your customers pain and offer a solution to their problems. Solution based selling means working with your customers to offer a solution to their business problems. Build a relationship with your customers to understand their businesses and learn what keeps their CEO awake at night.

One of the most valuable tools in any sales programme is the ability to forge and strengthen customer relationships। The complex sale demands multiple contacts, impacts shifting sources of power and decision in your customer's organisation. It requires you to manage a multitude of details thrown at you from every direction. Today's professionals need strategic and tactical advantages to retain and win valuable customers in a market of high uncertainties and intense competition. Salesxcellence's Sales Solutions training employs the latest research and development in the field of sales communications.