Selling during an economic downturn

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It’s no secret that most of the business sector—and the American public—believes we should brace for a recession, or even that we are already in one. Logistical bottlenecks for imported goods have driven up prices, global unrest has impacted supply, and challenges in major industries like automotive and oil and gas have broadly impacted the entire economy.

As inflation woes continue to build, demand has decreased, and many individuals and businesses are putting the checkbook away for the rest of 2022 while they wait and see what will happen. However, you have a business to run—and grow. An economic slowdown is nothing new, so how do companies keep selling and growing when nobody is buying?

If you want to weather the storm, here are a few steps you can take to set your businesses apart.

Increase Activity

When the going gets rough, many sales representatives will start to work less. Rejection is hard, and when the no’s increase, it’s easier to stay in the office. The best sales representatives will take the opposite approach—they increase their calls.

Sales is largely a numbers game: You put enough leads in the pipeline so that a 20% hit rate will help you reach your desired goal. If customers are buying less, you need to pump more contacts into the funnel.

Even more than simply increasing activity, elite sales professionals target highly qualified leads for more contacts. An article published by CBS News after the 2008 recession stated that average reps pick 50 prospects and contact them a few times—and usually stop calling them after three failures. Elite sales reps, on the other hand, narrow the focus to 10 highly qualified prospects and contact them 15 or 16 times.

Leave No Stone Unturned

Are you using all the sales tools available to you? The list of activities that qualify as “sales” is long, but most sales professionals resort to the old standbys of a phone call or email check-in with the hopes of a follow-up appointment.

When was the last time you deployed a catchy direct mail campaign? With bulging email inboxes, many marketing firms are reinventing direct mail by sending more expensive packages with a catchy message to a short list of highly qualified leads.

Are you dropping off samples? Have you hosted a customer open house this year? Are you posting on social media at a minimum of once a week? Are you updating your website monthly and posting blogs on various pages? Do you have a YouTube channel (which is now a larger search engine than Google, by the way)? Have you had a meeting with your sales team to identify all the activities you could implement—and then created a schedule for how often and when they will be done?

Use this time to develop a fourth-quarter plan that will ramp up sales work going into the new fiscal year.

Track, Measure, Adjust

A good sales organization is like a successful Major League Baseball team: It knows the numbers and how the odds play out in every scenario.

Every sales activity has a metric for success. The obvious one is hit rate—how many deals you close against the number you’ve pitched. Many activities only have an indirect impact on revenue growth, but that doesn’t mean you can’t measure their effectiveness.

Social media engagement can be measured in subscribers and followers. Direct mail campaigns can be measured by the percentage of targets that make an inquiry after they receive the package. Company events such as open houses and lunch-and-learns should track attendance.

Increasing sales activity needs to pay off, and if it doesn’t, you adjust. When you are more active, you measure more—and ultimately adjust more. You probably will need to increase the frequency of your sales strategy meetings so you can look at the numbers and brainstorm next steps.

Don’t Quit

A Harvard Business Review article in 2017 noted that sales professional turnover averaged 27%, which was twice the rate of the general labor force. When economic conditions decline, that percentage increases. Consequently, when companies have a hard time staffing the sales department, sales activity often goes dormant.

Check in with your sales team. Make them part of strategy development. Support them with expense budgets and marketing resources. If all else fails, pick up your own bag and hit the road.

In our small family business, I help my husband with capital and finance strategy. As an owner, I’m involved in the high-level operational decisions. But, as a 25-year sales veteran, I also make cold calls and do phone work to set appointments with prospects. My success has always been impacted by my ability, and willingness, to go back to the basics and do the work when we don’t have someone to fill the role.

And yes, I plan on increasing my activity this fall as well!