Mastering the World of Selling: The Ultimate Training Resource from the Biggest Names in Sales

Chapter 63. Selling in Harder Times

Neil Rackham

Here's a scary little factoid. Less than half of the business-to-business salespeople on the planet today have ever sold in an economic downturn. Think about it. One of the penalties of the longest expansion in history is that a whole selling generation has grown up knowing nothing about hard times and how to cope with them. And, for many of those who do remember recession, the memory is now so distant that it's a lurking discomfort rather than a crisp set of coping strategies. Even worse, middle-level sales managers—and sometimes senior management too—are woefully inexperienced when it comes to the tricky task of leading a sales force through difficult economic times.

So how do you handle the present "correction," "soft landing," "temporary economic rebalancing," or whatever other euphemism lets you avoid the dreaded "R" word? I'm already starting to see some companies implementing selling strategies that failed in the last downturn and are likely to have the same spectacular lack of success this time around.

WORKING HARDER ISN'T AN ANSWER

The first knee-jerk reaction in hard times is to push salespeople for more activity—more calls, more demos, more proposals. Now there's nothing wrong, in any economy, with working hard to fill the sales pipeline with every qualified opportunity you can find. In fact, studies done in the recession during the 1980s show that for smaller transactional sales, that was all you needed. Pure hustle, hard ...