Is it enough?

I recently watched the news about the eurozone and the rise in inflation, and a question surfaced.

Is it enough?

If we think so, many companies, entrepreneurs, and professionals probably think so too.

The question I ask is:
“What impact does all this have on our companies?”

Not the financial or sales-decreasing impact, which that one is clear, but the psychological impact of inaction.

Ask yourself the following question:
“Am I putting off investment decisions, campaigns, training, and strategies because of all this indecision?”

If your answer is yes, it’s worth thinking about what impact this will have on your business in 2023.

Much of what you will reap in the 1st half of 2023 is sown precisely at this time of year.

It is normal to reinforce campaigns, customer contacts, marketing initiatives, and all sorts of other initiatives that have their cost.

By freezing and postponing all these decisions and investments, we are clearly hurting the year 2023 even more.

The good news is that there is still time.

If you have one, get your commercial and marketing team together, and see where you can get some money to reinforce these two areas.

Believe me; it’s not only worth it but also essential.

You must position yourself in the minds of your customers from this month to the end of the year; if you don’t do it, others will surely do it.

At our company, we have always been very critical of the attitude usually taken toward opportunity funnel management.

Let’s divide a sales funnel into:

• Prospecting
• Meeting
• Proposal
• Negotiation
• Closing

A salesperson often thinks he can have real influence and completely dominate many of these phases.

Our experience is that if we are professional in all phases, to have a base of analysis here, the real component of the funnel that is only in the hand of the commercial, that is, that does not depend on anyone else, is precisely the first one.

Prospection, or, if you prefer, the generation of business opportunities.

Nowadays, the ratio of opportunities materialization has substantially decreased for most companies.

Either because salespeople are not so used to customers squeezing on prices or because customers no longer have the budget to buy.

What is certain is that before in 20 proposals, I closed 2; now, I only closed one.

The point is that you often optimize the process in the negotiation or closing phases.

These are phases that ultimately are not in our power.

If you want to buck the trend, you must focus on the first phase – deal opportunity generation.

This week get your team together and put the following questions on the table:

• What can we do to generate more opportunities?
• What haven’t we done so far?
• What are the competitors doing, and how successful are their initiatives?
• What other markets, types of customers, etc., have we yet to address or explore properly?
• What actions could we take to put our company in our customer’s attention and catch the 2023 startup?

Just one piece of advice!

Let the ideas flow, and don’t destroy them immediately with the usual “That doesn’t work”!

Let people participate and get involved in the solution. What do you think the result will be if you cut their legs off at the very beginning of the process?

This week please stop and think:

“To what extent has the uncertainty of the Post-Pandemic and inflation caused me to doze off a bit from what was critical to be already in motion?”

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Also published on Medium.