“Work smarter, not harder” has never been a more appropriate motto.

The focus should be on the skill, and not the activity when confronting selling in a down-market.

Extending this to the current economic climate, there is little point in driving the sales team to have more meetings with clients. This will simply mean they will meet more often with people they already know. They may have even spent money in the past; with your organisation.

However, these same clients do not have the discretionary spend that they previously enjoyed. Clients will generally not be inclined to reveal this to your sales executive, but are happy to have a free coffee and catch up, wasting your sales team’s time.

Change the focus

Instead, it is imperative that the sales executive secures meetings with decision makers higher up the value chain. They need to plan meticulously for each meeting with these decision makers and develop awareness around the client’s own problems and issues. This means investing more time in meeting preparation, leaving less time for just increasing the number of meetings.

However, when meetings are executed well with key decision makers, they will be more productive and have a measurable outcome, due to this preparation.

Meeting preparation

In order to ensure this radical change in behaviour, it is critical that the sales executive secures an action plan from every meeting, whereby adequate value is generated for the decision maker to agree to a course of action, that moves the sales forward.

The focus should be to make every meeting count, plan for advances, and measure the advances to provide a leading indicator of client activity. This will also help forecast what the actual results will look like in the coming quarter (i.e., a leading indicator of what will happen to your closed business).

After all, our clients are busier than ever before, and they will agree to specific advances only if they are serious about proceeding with exploring your offering.