Selling In A Downturn
What should you change about your sales process when times are tough?
It’s Bad Out There! (…Right?)
Andee Harris, CEO of Challenger, was nice enough to have me on the Winning the Challenger Sale podcast last week to talk about my job leading Growth at ParkerGale and what sales teams should do differently when the going gets rough.
If you want to listen, you can find the episode linked here.
I’ll admit — I feel both qualified and unqualified to talk about this subject. On the one hand, I started my career selling to hedge funds in the late 2000s. I’ve carried a quota during tough times. I know how to get creative when the commercial tide turns against you. On the other hand, this downturn feels a little different than what I’ve seen before. This “vibe-cession” doesn’t have the the same flavor of imminent doom we experienced a decade-and-a-half ago. The signals we’re getting are far more mixed.
So what should sales teams be doing differently in 2023?
Well, it depends.
That’s not a hedge. It’s an acknowledgment — that whatever’s happening to the economy is affecting everyone a little differently.
This is where Andee and I started our conversation. If you’ve already decided that it’s bad out there, there’s plenty of data and chatter you can cherry-pick to back up your broad-brush pessimism. But that’s lazy. Step one is figuring out “What does this mean for ME?” What’s your diagnosis? What does the data say? While it’s impossible to predict what will happen next, you can (and should) analyze what’s already happened inside of your business.
So few teams do though. Here’s how to fix that.
- First, pull some data. Grab a list of all the opportunities created during the past two calendar years from your CRM. Analyze your sales cycles, close rates (cohort-based, not milestone-based, please), ASPs, where you lose/where deals are getting stuck in the funnel, and rep performance. Make the data visual. It‘s easier to spot trends that way. What specifically has changed? Notice what’s actually happening to you before you succumb to the arm-crossing perspective that “everything is stupid and bad for everyone and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
- Clarify the “inside” vs. “outside” issues. Where is the unavoidable shadow of economic uncertainty showing up (e.g., longer cycles, fewer reps hitting plan, more discounting, deals that stall after the demo, etc.) and where is the evidence of your own unforced errors? Did you hire too many reps the last couple years? Did you change out a sales leader Big internal changes can (and probably did) impact your results. If you ignore them and pin a negative trend on the macro environment.… well, that’s a mistake. Talk as a team about where and how outside/macro forces are affecting you and what inside/executional gaps are still holding you back. Be as honest as you can about the difference. (Hint: This is also a sneaky-great team-building exercise and works great for a management team offsite.)
- Finally, make a list. Take inventory. What’s out of your hands and what can you control? This isn’t just good operational discipline. A finite list of the “inside” stuff you can change and the “outside” stuff you can’t will bring your team peace of mind. The list — and your worries — will seem more manageable and more confront-able once it’s written down. You’ll actually feel better. As Ulysses Grant wrote in his memoirs, “There are always more before they are counted.” So find the “inside” issues. The ones you can control. Count them. Then decide which one you’ll work on first.
Summarizing all that, here’s my two-step playbook for what to do in a downturn:
First, figure out what’s actually happening.
Then, improve what you can.
Easier said than done.
(But don’t not do it.)
Want more “moves you can make” in a downturn?
Check out the follow-on checklist to this article linked here.
