It seems as if it’s going to be a tough one. Get a plan and work the plan. Print and use the following as your basic work-list if you need a starting point. Add your own points. Circulate to the team. Insist on more action and less talk about the stock market, customers who have frozen budgets and how the local Starbucks is closing.
1. Set up an action team who meet every morning for 30 minutes prior to the working day to ask the question: what’s holding us back from best performance? List EVERY issue and give each an owner tasked to resolve it in 24h. I know: no more Mr Nice Guy.
2. Seek incremental improvement in everything you do. A 1% improvement here, multiplied by a 1% improvement there, multiplies up to deep, high pay-off improvements.
3. E.g. how can the sales team be coached to be at least 1% better at closing?
4. E.g. how can the payments team be encouraged to get money in at least 1% earlier than they currently do?
5. What does your analysis of ‘lost sales’ show? You don’t have one? Get one. Then take the biggest reason first and solve it. Then the next. Etc.
6. E.g. the biggest reason quoted for ‘lost sales’ is ‘price too high’. Mmm. Could be price is too high, could mean sales team are poor at handling price objection. Fix it. Quickly.
7. Work on how to increase the average value of the sale by 5% within 25 business days. Get creative. Check out Creativity101.
8. E.g. start charging realistically for your time.
9. How could you increase margin? What – if anything – in the portfolio is more price elastic i.e. the price can be put up without demand dropping? There MUST be something!
10. E.g. your cabling price per metre could be increased by 3%. Sure it isn’t much. But it is over time and over bigger projects. And it’s not a discretionary purchase.
11. All this attention on the here-and now is great. But are you making long-term progress, too? And what long-term thinking needs to be done?
12. When’s the next let’s go (not too) wild session? Gotta have some fun, you know. Fix a date. Let everyone know. Make sure it’s fully inclusive and not just free beer for the lads.
13. Is there anyone with whom you can partner to 'increase the pie' for both of you.
14. E.g. You sell water for coolers. They sell coffee for machines. Can you sell into each others customers? Sure you can.
15. Re-analyse what your potentials customer do, read and eat. What would be a simpler/budget way to speak to them? What about an advert in the flower bed at the junction to the industrial park where they all seem to be based? They don’t allow ads? They didn’t-you can surely overcome that objection!
16. Where are the biggest costs. What can be reduced? Or delayed?
17. E.g. get a handle on all the multiple often fuzzy costs e.g. expenses, stationery purchases.
18. What needs do you meet? How can you make that need more acute? Bigger? More urgent? Needed by more people? Anybody will buy anything as long as they have a big enough why.
19. Who’s your best salesperson? How much better are than your weakest? What do they do that makes them better? Transfer that skill or attitude across the rest of the team. Now.
20. Get a few good sales books. Ask the sales team to read handy tips at the sales meeting. Check out Beat the Recession and Instant MBA from me. Thanks so much to cool blogger Cultural Offering for a nice review of the latter.
21. Who buys from you? Which are your key accounts? How do you thank them? Do they know you love them dearly. It’s no good telling them when they leave you.
22. Drink more water. Take a 5 minute break every 45 minutes. Take a lunch break of 45 minutes.
23. Go home on time.
24. Thank people for doing a great job.
25. Keep in mind what is really important: don’t get trivia hypnosis.