Consider how much disruption you have been dealing with over the past several months. Your customers are doing the same. Customers have less time to consider options much less make decisions. They want convenience more than ever before.
While maintaining a robust pipeline may be challenging now, demand for what you offer will return. Customers will be equally busy going readjusting when normalcy returns. Some ideas for thinking through how easy your company is to work with and what improvements can be made…
How easy is it to do business with you and/or your company?
Here are some questions and ideas (I am sure you will have others) to consider:
- Where does the sales process get stalled, delayed?
- Early when qualifying?
- Qualified, but proposals take too long?
- Other point in the process?
- How has your company adapted to working within restrictions on in person meetings?
- How prepared will your company be when demand for your solutions picks back up?
- What are competitors doing that make it easy for their customers?
Sample Actions
You are looking for what will be relatively easy to implement and have the desired impact. Let’s say for example your challenge is: Developing a proposal or pricing takes longer than desired
- Create a template and save time!
- Identify what is repetitive in the most common quotes/proposals
- Create a template so you can focus on filling in the variable information
- Use estimated pricing to respond rapidly!
- Review recent proposals for products/services commonly ordered and summarize estimated pricing
- Enables you to respond on the spot to customers and save time qualifying opportunities
Customers considering doing something “internally”
Whether you are selling financial services, IT services or real estate it is important to remember customers many times consider “doing it” themselves. This makes them a competitor. How can you get the customer to see that leveraging your company’s experience is more convenient and provides greater value than doing it themselves?
What about your references?
You probably already have many customers that would be happy to speak highly of your company. How long has it been since someone has checked in with them? Proactively connecting with them and “coaching” them on what you would like them to focus on (e.g. ease of doing business) could have significant positive impact for you!
A real-time example
My son runs a small landscaping business in our town. He and his partner in the business took “before” and “after” pictures while working on jobs last year. They used these pictures in a Facebook post early this Spring as they were re-opening the business for this season. The pictures made it easy for potential customers to see the type and quality of work…they got over 40 messages in 2 days from potential customers interested in their services!
Feel free to contact me directly for ideas and/or help on this or other topics!