Selling during a downturn: Three tips to drive more sales

In an uncertain economy, it’s the small to medium businesses (SMBs) that often struggle the most. Right now, consumer behaviours are shifting due to inflation, supply chain delays, a focus on ESG and a potential recession on the horizon — all elements outside of a business’s control. This can ultimately impact your bottom line, with sales figures dropping and prospects going AWOL.

But just because market conditions aren’t ideal, that doesn’t mean you should keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing. Being a proactive leader and creating a more adaptable business environment for your account executives can help you drive more sales during these challenging periods.

Top challenges facing account executives

The ability to sell goods and services is not a static skill. Your approach must evolve and adapt to external forces like technology, customer sentiment, digitalisation and new competitor strategies. For modern SMBs and in particular account executives, they are facing three major challenges in their ability to sell their products:

1. Building a consistent process: The ability to define and then implement a sales strategy that is quickly adopted by the rest of the business is difficult no matter how cohesive the team. Poor access to a documented sales strategy is often the biggest downfall.
2. Sourcing pipeline: More and more, account executives are being expected to source their own pipeline. This blurring of the sales development role means account executives are less efficient and less capable of maintaining their existing client relationships.
3. Pipeline coverage: With so many competing responsibilities, SMB leaders are being stretched thin as they try to manage their day-to-day responsibilities while also putting out fires — made even more challenging in an uncertain market. The best solution is a sales engagement platform that automates time-consuming tasks and provides a holistic, real-time view of the entire sales pipeline.

Here are three ways that savvy SMBs and account executives are tackling these modern sales challenges.

1. Expand your pipeline with strategic alliances and partnerships 

Particularly during uncertain times, SMBs need to be focused on curating — and especially building — their pipeline. Having a robust partner ecosystem can help provide quality leads when you need them most.

Especially when you operate in a crowded industry, it’s easy to think you are alone in your sales efforts. But building strategic alliances with companies offering complimentary product offerings and services who have a similar go-to-market strategy can provide mutual value and help you scale up your sales pipeline.

Of course there must be a deliberate partnership-mapping process to ensure the value is clear, particularly in how the two businesses will work together to drive mutual value for customers. Then it’s all about fostering a positive mentality across your team so that they understand the importance of investing their time with partners and are always looking out for opportunities to co-sell into new accounts and open up an existing client list to cross-sell and drive more value added engagement.

By treating your partners as customers, it can result in a win-win for everyone.

Put it into practice. Try the free cadence builder. And evaluate your current processes for areas of Improvement with a Free Sales Optimisation & Benchmark Assessment.

2. Source first-hand customer insights

One of the biggest ways uncertainty negatively impacts sales is by hampering your sales reps ability to accurately forecast. With your usual data streams only painting part of the whole picture, you need to go directly to the source: your customers.

Getting first-hand insights into customer interactions is easier than you think. Something as simple as conversation intelligence, which records zoom/team calls and provides data driven insight, can help you see if your sales reps are communicating effectively, hitting the right messaging, asking engaging questions and positioning your brand as the best solution for your customers’ pain points.

3. Improve time management for higher-value work

With so many competing tasks and cash flow tightening in the face of uncertainty, it’s important that you clear the way for high-value work. That’s why good time management is so critical right now.

Sales executives need to focus on the activities that will generate the most revenue — there’s no time for inefficiencies. If you want to boost sales, you need your team to help customers reach the end of the funnel — that is, the sale point — quicker. By using a sales engagement platform that can eliminate the most wasteful, repetitive and time-consuming tasks, you can free up resources and focus on more value added activities that drive profitability for your business.

Using technology to generate more revenue faster

In our hyperconnected world, SMBs must take advantage of every weapon at their disposal — not only to help them navigate uncertain times, but to stay ahead of the competition and carve out a market niche. One of the best ways to do that is by harnessing the power of sales technology to scale and maximise current resources to drive revenue in this competitive market. 

Salesloft understands that targeting the right audience, converting prospects and ultimately boosting sales is an ongoing challenge — which is why its comprehensive platform is designed to give you the most important tools and integrations for digital selling. With consumer sentiment shifting, you shouldn’t be wasting time on dead-end opportunities. Instead, you need a platform to help you expand your pipeline, close more deals and increase your win rate.