The last decade has been kind to sales teams. Leads were flowing in, goals were getting hit consistently, and the commission checks kept coming. Everyone was enjoying being the beneficiaries of a tailwind economy. But, nine months ago the tides began to turn. Sales teams started to see fewer inbound leads, increased cancellations, and more price pushback. Today, we’re in a position that we have not been in since the Great Recession of 2008.
When this happens, salespeople have a tendency to dwell on the slowdown and feel sorry for themselves. It’s the responsibility of sales leaders to take action and arm their team with the tools to sell through a slowdown. We teamed up with the Chili Piper team to share 3 strategies sales leaders can implement during this rocky period.
Boost Morale
Economic slowdowns usually mean that sales teams struggle to hit their revenue goals. If your team is consistently missing revenue goals, it may be time to reconsider how you are measuring success. Up until recently, the Chili Piper sales team’s North Star metric was ARR. As that has become increasingly difficult to hit, their sales leaders stratified their goals into controllable behaviors. They now look at metrics that their AEs have complete control over including number of accounts & contacts reached out to, quantity of outbound behavior, etc. Changing your goalposts into achievable and controllable behaviors gives your sales team increased confidence that they can hit their goals.
Handling Price Pushback
When the market goes down, prospects’ budgets begin to shrink. Sales leaders are tasked with coaching their team to handle price pushback. The most important thing to teach your sales team is the importance of emotional neutrality. It’s human instinct to get emotional when it comes to talking about money. Encourage your team to intentionally remove any personal emotion from economics discussions. Coach them to think of the conversation from a mathematical perspective. The goal of economics discussion is to collaboratively work out the math with the prospect to determine whether the deal makes logical sense.
Increase Momentum
Speed is the name of the game during an economic slowdown. Now, it’s more important than ever to create a sense of urgency within your sales team. A Velocify survey reports that responding to an inbound lead within one minute can increase lead conversion by 391%. If that response time is just one minute longer, the conversion rate is less than half as much at 160%.
Not only should you be coaching your team to respond quickly, you should encourage them to set meetings within 1-3 days of the request. Sales reps sometimes look at their calendar and see that they’re busy, so they push the meeting out to the following week. That may have worked in the last few years, but won’t cut it now.
No one knows how long this slowdown will last. But for now, it is our current reality. Take control as a leader by revamping your strategy when it comes to morale, money, & momentum!