Fewer new sales opportunities, longer than average sales cycle, increased efforts to close a sale and shrinking deal-sizes tell you that you may be heading toward a "Sales Trouble".
You know tough times are looming ahead when you start spending more than normal effort to close a sale. Maybe your prospects have become more fastidious or you sell something that requires lot of educating and explaining.
You know you may be one step ahead of the blues when your deal sizes keep getting smaller. May be your prospects have suddenly become tight wads or you have only small prospects in your sales pipeline.
You know you are heading towards lean times if you have very few genuine sales opportunities on hand and more fresh opportunities do not seem to be on the horizon once you are done with current ones.
Effective sales and marketing processes are very critical to the success of any company. Not only do they provide smooth sales but also they keep the cost of acquiring customers low. However, increasingly more companies are finding developing such processes to be quite a challenge.
Sometimes big companies seem like impenetrable fortresses making the information gathering task difficult if you don't know anyone who works there. Even finding the name of the right person to talk to is not easy. But, you git to find the names of the decision makers if you want to sell to them.
You are in a small boat and want to cross a large ocean. Now would you hitch your boat to a large ship that could very easily pull you along and take your boat across the ocean? But what about the strong wake of the ship? Will it let your boat stay afloat or capsize it?
Prospecting is one activity that greatly increases the probability for sales and it should not be left to only sales people rather all top managers should play a role in it, which means you need to have a strategy for it.
We’ve had several calls inquiring about our properties because they saw our ad in Mood Indico published by Cerebral Works, Inc. It is an excellent way to get our name exposed to Indians living in the USA. -- Manav Malhotra Gauransh Associates
