Are you in the middle of the greatest sales climate of your career?
If you had your choice, which would be your preferred selling market… a market in which you have weak or no competitors, or a market with entrenched, stabilized competitors?
The fact is if you are worth your salt, you are perhaps in the best sales climate of your career. I must be kidding –right? Consider this:
Five or ten years ago, everyone had plenty of cash, and seemingly, every prospective client had a home. To bring in new client business, it was likely you had to struggle to identify unknown, credit risky targets, and educate them about why they needed your product/service; or you had to try and steal market share by persuading well-serviced clients to make a move, probably on price. Your competitors had the money to pour into service and if a prospect or client balked, your competitors could also throw money at them.
Raise your hand if have had a competitor close their doors in the last 90 days. Raise your hand if you have had clients close their doors in the last 90 days. OK – put your hands down. Economic strategists, business leaders, and the reputable media tell us every minute of the day 20%-30% of businesses in many sectors will close their doors in the current climate.
If your competitors lose 20%-30% of their client base to business closure (not much to be done about it; no reactive pursuit to drag the business back), and the fact that the added stress of their remaining base is measurably constricting their spending, businesses are scrambling to stay afloat. Knee-jerk reaction to lost revenue is cutbacks in staff, cutbacks in hours, cutbacks in spending, all of which lead to cutbacks in service. What is the number one reason clients leave? Poor service. They are ripe and ready for the picking. Go get them. Now you must have fair pricing (notice I did not say lowest or even competitive) and be able to fulfill your promises of service and quality. Smart businesses will recognize these weaknesses in their competitors and exploit them.
Basic math says: 70%-80% of your competitor’s book of business is available to be captured – prospects who already know why they need your product or service; prospects who are already buying; prospects who are likely suffering from a service level issue.
Go get them. They will not come to you. Pardon the analogy, but what do rats on a sinking ship do? (I’m not saying that our prospects are rats, just hear me out.) Survival instincts take over and they jump onto the first seemingly stable thing that floats by. Ship wrecks sink on the spot; they do not typically float safely into the harbor and allow calm disembarking. You have to go to them. So, I’ve said it three times so far – go. Are you catching my point?
Because of fear and caution in the marketplace, you may have to double your prospecting efforts and tighten your sales interview behavior to bring them in; but the fact is that you have a fantastic prospecting market. Are you up for the work? Do you have a plan? Do you own the behaviors to make it happen? If you don’t, realize your competitors will be targeting you instead! You must do the work.
Beware – if you look like, smell like or act like the individual they trusted the last time, then you are in trouble. Prospects have their antennae up and they are watching closely. Do you know how? Do you know how to launch a conversation with the battle-weary prospect, who themselves may actually be pulling back? Prospects have become cautious, even fearful. You had better be able to move them out of that mode and into an active stance to get business done. Do this well and frequently enough, and then your 2009 will show the most new client growth you’ve seen in years!
