A slow sales month can be demoralizing, particularly for dedicated sales teams who are working hard to achieve their targets.
In some cases, slow sales months can be the result of external factors. Right now, the Coronavirus pandemic has caused poor business performance for almost every organization in the corporate landscape.
External factors aren’t a cause for complacency. On the contrary, you need to be focusing on optimizing your sales approach during this challenging time.
If your business is facing a slow sales month, then here are some practical tips to help you drive your sales team towards future success.
Review Their Sales Practices
One of the first things you need to do when you notice that your sales team is having a slow month is to find out why.
Explore their processes and check that your team is creating effective sales pipelines to drive new leads towards becoming paying customers.
If your team’s sales pipeline is not functioning properly, then teach them how to build a sales pipeline so that they can create their own and experiment with new techniques.
One of the tricks for creating a successful sales pipeline is to implement MQL and SQL pipeline stages into the funnel, which will help to define and measure your leads further.
If they aren’t doing this already, help them out by providing them with guides and how-tos so they can implement everything correctly.
Communicate With Your Sales Team
As part of your search for information about why sales are slowing, you need to speak to the people who will know the most: your sales staff.
They will be working closely with potential customers, so they might have valuable insight into why they are no longer buying the way they did previously.
Also, your sales team might have ideas about how you can improve your sales process and the efficiency within your organization, so it is important that you communicate with them.
Asking for their input will make them feel included and valued, so it can boost morale as well as providing valuable insight.
Check Customer Feedback
Often, customers who are not reordering, or leads that have chosen not to book will have provided feedback in the form of the reasons behind their decision.
Read through this feedback to see if there are any comments that your team can take on board and use to improve their approach.
You can also use this feedback to create responses and build up your client personas, so make sure that you don’t waste this important resource by ignoring it.
Add Additional Methods of Communication
Phone and email remain popular ways to conduct sales, but the modern world now contains a wide range of different communication platforms.
Customers want convenience and easy access to the information they need, so explore the alternative ways your sales team can communicate with leads and clients.
Whether it is through chatbots on your site or a social media platform, you should add more ways for customers to find out more about your company and order your solutions.
Adjust Your Future Targets
An ongoing external situation might mean that your sales are going to slow down for the foreseeable future. If your team has unrealistic targets, then they will be demotivated and won’t put their full effort into their work.
Creating accurate and achievable sales targets is a vital step towards motivating your sales staff and creating a dynamic internal culture.
Review your sales targets regularly to ensure that your team always has aims that benefit both them and your organization as a whole.
It can be tough to support a denormalized sales team, but by using these tips, you can help them to regain their confidence and recuperate from their slow month.
It might not be an immediate bounce back, but by being proactive and doing everything you can to improve sales and boost morale, you will help your team to get back on track towards earning sales that can finance your business’s future growth and prosperity.