🚪 2 Choices: Sell or Sell
🧯 Close a Revenue Gap
💼 Circling the Wagons
🚪 2 Choices: Sell or Sell
The media makes it sound like the economy is firing on all cylinders. The story on the ground is different. The downturn is biting. Companies that soared through the pandemic are experiencing pullbacks of 30-40%.
Even traditional manufacturing is suffering. In Ontario, Ford announced it is shuttering its Oakville production plant until 2027. This is having a cascade effect downstream with canceled or delayed contracts. Many automotive suppliers have experienced a 30% drop in revenue since the start of 2023.
The steep decline in revenue has left business owners with one of three choices:
🚪 Exit
🌱 Grow
🐢 Turtle
Turtling or riding it out isn’t an option. That will make things worse.
That leaves business owners with one of two choices: 🌱 Sell or 🚪 Sell.
Both are viable options, but commit! Are you going to take your chips off the table and exit, or are you going to innovate, fight, and grow your business?
One Stat to Watch
$1.07 trillion
U.S. commercial real estate debt that’s coming due by the end of 2025. Office vacancies are at record highs in the U.S. and Canada, and losses from the sector could have ripple effects across multiple industries and markets.
🧯 Close a Revenue Gap
When your company is in danger of missing its sales targets or budget, it needs to close a revenue gap.
The pressure is real, especially when you have to meet targets for shareholders or external stakeholders (like the bank). In a downturn, the pressure is greater. If things don’t turn around layoffs or cuts may follow.
Closing a revenue gap is a sales challenge, not a marketing challenge. Marketing is simply too slow. You can’t hope, pray, and wait for marketing to kick in. You have to sell!
There are 3 elements of running a sales sprint to close a revenue gap:
- Get Hyper Focused on Burning Needs: Identify a problem or need in your customers, and be decisive in how your company will be of service.
- Sell to Decision Makers: You can't afford to get stuck in procurement. Closing a revenue gap requires selling to decision makers that can allocate budgets and make purchase decisions.
- Be 150% Committed: Dramatically increase the volume of outbound sales activity. This requires top down leadership to direct the whole organization to prioritize sales and business development.
💼 Circling the Wagons
One of my favorite prospecting tactics is “Circling the Wagons.”
A referral is one of the best sources for new business, but sometimes your sales approach needs a little more oomph. Instead of getting one introduction, get three!
Circling the Wagons means finding multiple people to refer you at roughly the same time. A prospect may ignore one referral, but chances are they won’t ignore three!
LinkedIn was built for this sales tactic. Find mutual contacts that can make logical introductions. These are people who know your business and the prospect’s business and can speak with a degree of authority.
Timing is everything in Circling the Wagons. Be strategic in your approach and try to coordinate the introductions to happen within short succession of each other. If timed well, you will be hard to ignore!
Circling the Wagons is a lot of work, but effective. Generating multiple simultaneous referrals will get you a meeting with a high value prospect.
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