Sales Leadership in a Tough Market – Situation Snapshot

Understanding precisely how a tough market or downturn is affecting your business can be quite difficult.  Maybe everything looks fine, the last quarter was ok, but in reality underneath the surface the threats are gathering.  On the other hand if results are already falling short of plan and you take corrective action but only have incomplete data and do not verify it you could make the situation worse not better.  The picture can be further confused by your sales team who, only used to easier markets, throw out requests for more support without analysing precisely what they want or need.

So there is a need for a quick, lightweight but comprehensive snapshot of your sales situation.  With this snapshot you can take informed decisions to protect your sales now and prepare for growth in the future.

The magnificent 7 ways to give you an accurate situation snapshot:

1. First and most important gather accurate intelligence.  Make sure you have verifiable facts and not assumptions.  Keep of record of who provides the intelligence since the source always places some interpretation on the facts and try to get people with differing viewpoints on issues for a balanced summary
2. Intelligence and data sources should include: customers, business partners, and competitors, professional bodies for your industry and those for your customers, industry sector and financial analysts.  Your own staff in sales, marketing, company executives and other key managers should all be contributing intelligence such that you get the full picture.  Internal mail lists such competition@xxx make it easier to contribute
3. External data points that help you assess where your business is include: is the average time to win a new order lengthening, are customers taking longer to pay, is the volume of new enquiries reducing, is competitive activity changing, are suppliers in difficulty and are government regulations changing quickly?
4. Internal data points include: the projection of sales revenues and/or P&L, the status of sales force morale, are marketing campaigns continuing to generate new leads, does your current go to market plan still make sense, do you need to reduce costs /headcount, is each member of the sales team resilient and generating business and are sales and marketing working very closely together?
5. For each of the subjects listed at 3 & 4 here ask yourself, how does that affect: your customers, your suppliers, your team, you and your results over the next 12 months
6. Test questions to use are: what has stopped, what has started and what has changed in the last few months
7. Finally with this analysis done you can evaluate potential solutions by considering what happens if you do nothing (you may need to wait for a clearer picture to form) or what happens if you decide on some new initiatives/ changes?  Informed decisions that are taken calmly, based on verified intelligence are an effective response to tough market conditions, should protect your business and in parallel reassure the sales team about your leadership.

For a comprehensive discussion of all these points and 15 other sessions check out the online sales leadership course How to protect your topline in a downturn.

Richard Lowe
www.lets-begin.com