Top tips for tough times: Print 21 magazine article

Selling during a downturn is one of the greatest challenges that a salesperson will ever face. Peter Barnet has more tips on how to survive when the going gets tough.

Before I respond to the flood of requests for more selling tips for tough times, here are the latest revelations about selling in times like these from Neil Rackham, creator of SPIN selling.

* Only 50 per cent of sales people on the planet have sold in an economic downturn.
* Sales cycles are typically 40 per cent longer in an economic downturn.
* It is a fallacy that customers buy purely on price in hard-times; they actually buy on value.
* Research shows that during difficult times customers buy ‘safety’ ie less risk. During such times, decisions are made more by committees and lower risk options are generally favoured in group decision making.
* Buyers of products realise their decisions will come under greater scrutiny and they may be personally blamed if a deal goes poorly.

So, taking these thoughts into account, here we go with five more ideas you can put into practice immediately to win extra business.

Join a Business Networking Group. It surprises me how many of these groups there are and how few graphic arts people join them. Business Network International (BNI) is probably the best to join as they have a methodical and business-like approach <www.bni.com.au>. They also train you in the art of referral marketing which will then help you to ask your existing clients for referrals and even get referrals for them. Taking into account that customers buy on value, how valuable would that be to your clients!

There is also a local chamber of commerce in almost every local council area with members who love to deal with people they know and trust in their local area. Members of these groups also like to refer fellow members to their networks. The secret to success in networking is not to expect to get business immediately. You have to take the time to get to know the other members and have them get to know and trust you. And be prepared to give lots of referrals before you get any.

These are just two examples but there are many more if you feel that these aren’t right for you. Hint: they are not print industry events.

Refine your sales process and up-skill the sales team. As only 50 per cent of salespeople on the planet have sold in an economic downturn, now is the perfect time to up-skill the team and create more sales. Doing this will put you further ahead of the opposition now and will make you a leading sales organisation when we come out of these challenging times. Investing in sales training now, even the most basic, will give you twice as much value.

Refine your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). (Or check your horse for a pulse.) What do you help your customers do? What do you want to be world famous at? If you found it hard to answer that question, you are riding a dead horse and you should get off it or change riders.

The tribal wisdom of the North American Dakota Indians, passed down from generation to generation, says that “when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount”. This wisdom extends to an understanding of the strategies that do not work. These include:

* Buying a stronger whip.
* Doing nothing: “This is the way we have always ridden dead horses”.
* Visiting other countries to see how they ride dead horses.
* Performing a productivity study to see if lighter riders improve the dead horse’s performance.
* Modifying existing standards to include dead horses.
* Harnessing several dead horses together in an attempt to increase their speed.
* Re-classifying the dead horse as “living-impaired”.
* Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

Of course, a dead horse to the Dakota Indians was one that could no longer perform to the ability required during a battle and was therefore running dead. They would simply dismount at an opportune time and a fresh horse would be delivered to them by a rider who had the sole responsibility of providing fresh horses to the warriors in the front line.

While there is no doubt that running a business and selling more is about taking risks, there needs to be an appreciation that sometimes the only means of achieving the desired results is to adopt new strategies. In a way, persevering with poor strategy is like putting up with a car engine that is steadily going out of tune. It’s not until you have it serviced that you truly understand how bad things were. Perhaps if car engines or business strategies were more like horses, the path to non-performance would be a lot faster and we would be more ready to make the required changes.

Create alliances to grow business. Alliances and partnerships are a great way to grow your business in challenging times. You could team up with a local personal trainer or gym owner and offer a free personal training session with every order over $500 for your customers. In return, you could offer a special offer to all their customers. For example, a simple one would be to pay for 500 business cards and get 1,000. The principle here is to allow your customers to get a special offer from your trusted network and then reciprocate it. Like networking, it’s all about spreading your potential customer base using someone else’s trusted network.

A word of warning here is to be crystal clear about what each party will get and to test with a customer first to ensure you are not about to upset them.

Create a purple cow in your business. If you have not read it yet go out and buy a book called Purple Cow by Seth Godin <www.sethgodin.com>. There are a gazillion ideas here that you can use to get your business recognised and remembered by clients, new and existing. You need to create something unique for your business that makes you stand out just like a purple cow would in a field of brown ones. Here is one for free: create a welcome kit for customers with a little book about who you are and how you do business differently from everyone else – use your USP described above. You could then offer to do one for all your clients using their USP to give to their customers – what a great way to create a demand with a simple idea.

Happy selling and be like me – refuse to participate in any economic downturn.