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This is the last article in a series discussing three different business scenarios and what each can do to survive and thrive during a recession. If you’ve missed our introduction article “The Ultimate Guide to Predictable B2B Sales During a Recession”, read it here first. While there are five steps to ensure predictable sales, we’ve highlighted three specific actions to take if you’re a new business.
For new businesses that have started in the past 24 months, the first article is for you.
For established businesses who aren’t feeling the pinch of the recession, check out the second article.
Let’s get into the third and final article. This is for you if you are an established business and you have recently started to experience a downturn. Things may have been as recently as last year or a few months ago, but now everything is starting to look a bit down.
Struggling is perhaps a bit of a strong word here, what I mean is your business isn’t performing at the level it has previously or the level you expected it to. This isn’t necessarily a bad position to be in, depending on how long this has been going on. If you’ve caught it early then there are plenty of options on the table. Leave it too long and as your cash dries up, so do the options.
A reduction in sales can be broadly attributed to either internal or external influences. To keep things concise, we’ll focus on external influences that are causing issues. Internal problems like poor customer service, issues with the product, and problems with the company culture are outside the scope of this article.
It is customary to think that cutting costs and hiring a new salesperson could be a solution. I strongly disagree because:
- When times are getting tough, Marketing is needed more than ever (read more about it in “The Ultimate Guide to Predictable B2B Sales During a Recession”)
- When sales are slowing down a new salesperson might be not a viable solution for your company – learn the reasons why in the article 13 Common Myths About Hiring Salespeople: Debunked
External Influences
The easiest way to understand if it’s an external influence is to explore what the rest of your industry is experiencing.
Is there a general decline that seems to be hitting everyone?
Is your industry closely tied to something that is performing poorly at the moment?
Be this property prices, inflation, commodity prices, etc. If the reason is easy to identify, it can be easy to solve.
You of course can’t do much to control these external influences, at least not now, instead focus on what you can control:
- Your business
- Your team culture
- Sales Process
- Work efficiency
- Use of technology to do more with less effort
When external influences are rocking your business, it’s time to look inward.
Retaining Customers
If you’ve been losing customers, it’s a good idea to reach out to 5-10 and have a chat to discuss why they have left. This may provide insights that you haven’t thought of before. Perhaps there is a hot new entrant to the market you’ve overlooked. Or perhaps they just don’t have the cash flow to invest with you. Until you actually speak to them, it’s hard to really have a clear picture of what is going on.
In my experience, companies are often too shy to reach out to past customers assuming that there is some awkwardness or bad feelings. If you did something wrong, then of course the obvious solution moving forward is to improve your performance. But if you did nothing wrong then you may be surprised that your past customers would welcome your call and may gladly share their feedback about your company and the quality of products/services.
In any case, the key objective is to retain what customers you have. It costs easily 10x more to win a new client vs. sell to your existing customer. So conversely, you should fight 10x as hard to keep your current clients happy and buying from you. The advice here is very similar to that for companies whose business is doing well, so you can skip up a few paragraphs to that section and have a read.
PRACTICAL ACTION to fight this 10x more that costs you nothing or very little:
- Embrace Campaign Based Marketing businesses:
- It could be sending a letter of appreciation or customer testimonials with each invoice
- Try slipping in a block of chocolate, with a note saying thank you for your custom
- Even adding the words “THANK YOU!” to your invoice might make someone’s day and positively differentiate you from the others.
Old school? Yes. But because hardly anyone does this these days, it ensures you can stand out. A $3 block of chocolate is unlikely to break your bank, but it can build loyalty for an account spending thousands of dollars a month. The idea is to provide value at minimal additional cost to you.
- Run an online webinar to answer questions about your products or services or to demonstrate and explain your products and services further. Recently we called 200 customers of a software development company and discovered that 34% of them wanted to participate in a webinar explaining the software they are already using.
- Make an extra customer care phone call. No staff? No time to do that? Well if the times are a bit tight your reception or even your accounts can do these calls with no other purpose but to build better personal relationships and show good customer service. A non-sales person might even have a better conversation along the lines of “How are things? How we can best serve you?”
- Send weekly or fortnightly newsletters with industry updates, your company services/products explanation, and introduce your team (ask us for help if you are not sure where to start).
- Take your key customer/s/ to lunch – your investment is way less than their overall business with you at stake.
Want more? Register for a session with me and discover more money-making low-cost solutions you can start doing right now https://lnkd.in/dfGYSdUm
Review Internal Marketing
If you’ve “been good”, you have some form of sales & marketing in place. Now is the time to sit up and review what is and isn’t working. It’s possible you fell asleep at the wheel and forgot to measure; this can make things tricky now but not impossible.
Any brand-building activities can likely be put on hold without any major effects in the short-medium term or reviewed to make sure there is a direct sales call to action. This includes things like industry and business memberships you don’t use, radio spots, billboards, any kind of sponsorship, TV spots, and EXPO. Trade Shows and EXPOs may be okay to stay, as long as you are making the most of these events by capturing leads and then following up with them. If you’re just there to shake hands and give away some candy then perhaps it’s best to skip this.
It’s best to favour things that can be directly linked to new sales.
In short: lead generation.
Since you’re in B2B, the most effective forms of outreach will be: calling, email, social media, google ads, SEO, and maybe mail.
Yes, some of these are a bit outdated, but a call to a decision-maker still works and is still the fastest way to get to a yes or a no. SEO can be a tricky one as it’s a very broad topic. I would suggest focusing specifically on on-page SEO, and ensuring any agency working on this for you is creating quality content. Backlinks generally aren’t the only important thing these days and this content becomes more and more important in the eyes of Google as time marches on. Be careful about deploying Chat GPT to do this for you – Google will eventually penalise this content so it’s best to avoid any AI-writing tools.
One of the most common challenges we witness is when a company full of sales “farmers” is trying to force them to become “hunters” going out to do cold calling and opening new sales. This never works even with the best intentions and huge company support.
Read more about this in my article 13 Common Myths About Hiring Salespeople: Debunked
PRACTICAL ACTION. Is there a solution? Yes, there are three effective solutions and two of them are FREE:
- It’s FREE for you as a business owner to embrace opening new sales yourself. This is not beneath you to return to the market – most times you have the highest expertise, and the best connections and you can tweak your prices to close more sales.
- It’s FREE for you to inspire your “farmer” minded salespeople to offer the best customer service and call your existing and past customers to upsell.
- And of course, you can reach out to a company like Smarketing Lab where we can call for you and secure new appointments and open new opportunities. That is a hands-free solution that works well too.
Google Ads are another questionable item for several B2B companies. If done properly you should have a stream of enquiries. However, so many get it wrong. A good check to see if the ads are working for you is to see if you can pull up a list of enquiries that came from the ads. If this cannot be produced, you’re likely getting a bad deal which should be reviewed.
Review Sales Performance
Hopefully, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you, but it’s time to check in and see what your salespeople are doing. If you happen to be in charge – then check in on yourself. The key thing you need to see is the sales process. I know enough about businesses to tell you that you probably don’t have a formalised sales process. But it’s important to get something on paper, a rudimentary flow chart at least.
Once you have a basic idea of how you get sales, you can start looking at measuring things and then improving areas that aren’t performing. Without this process in place, it really becomes difficult to troubleshoot sales as there is no telling what is really going on.
For example, has the number of prospects coming from your website fallen, or has the number of calls your salespeople made dropped? Perhaps the issue is prospects are choosing to put off the decision more than before. If you’re not measuring anything, then you will never really know. Humans aren’t great with giving accurate estimates, so any qualitative feedback you get will likely be at least half wrong. In short: Get your act together and start measuring things.
When you measure, you can find a bottleneck.
When you don’t measure every step you can’t possibly find what needs to be improved.
PRACTICAL ACTION:
- Draw a sales process – involve your sales team to help
- Ask to see sales stats in order to identify the areas of greatest concern
- Implement a CRM so that you can have access to stats with ease at any time
3 Steps for Established Businesses with Lower Sales
To sum up, if your issue is external, you likely can’t do much about it. So rather than sulking, go look internally for ways to improve your situation.
- Start by ensuring you stop losing customers, provide them the value they crave and ensure you go above and beyond for them.
- Second review any unnecessary marketing spend like brand awareness, and refocus this on lead generation.
- Finally work with your sales to produce a sales process, you’ll need it now and, in the future, to tune up sales.
Still in Doubt?
You’re not alone. When sales are slipping it can be easy to enter a panic and freeze, not sure what to do next. While the steps in this article are good areas to start, sometimes you just don’t have the time or mental capacity for anything. That’s when you know it’s a good idea to get some help.
Here at Smarketing Lab,
we have a number of ways we can assist. The lowest level is being a virtual CMO for your business. You’ll meet with me every week for 14 weeks and we will set 10 goals to achieve over this period of 100 days. This can be a real game-changer as we navigate through any issues you have around Sales and Marketing and how to resolve them.
If you feel you need a bigger hand – the next step up is us doing the marketing for you. We can start with a strategy or a Strategic Action Plan. The next step is discussing what internal resources exist and where there is a gap that needs to be filled. Our team has a wide range of skills from calling, copywriting, web design, LinkedIn management, email marketing and more. We can assist you at every level of your marketing no matter how big or small.
Reach out and book time with me today – https://lnkd.in/dfGYSdUm
Assia Salikhova
Smarketing Lab Co-Creator,
developer of profitable B2B solutions to grow your business.
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