3 Questions to Ask When You Have a Bad Sales Week
Having a bad sales day? Eh. Shrug it off. Chalk it up to being “just one of those days,” go home, relax, read something inspirational, and get a good night’s sleep.
Having a bad sales week? A bad sales month? Okay. Pause. Time to evaluate. A bad sales week can turn into a bad sales month which can quickly snowball into a bad quarter and potentially lead to a disappointing (a.k.a. BAD) year.
Bad sales weeks happen to the best salespeople. While a bad sales week isn’t fatal, it’s wise to self-critique and see if any negative patterns exist so you can make plans to improve.
1. How Are You Prioritizing Your Time?
Here’s a great activity to find out if you are making the best use of your time during working hours.
Take one week and meticulously write down every activity and how long you spend doing it. Then, at the end of the week, analyze your findings. How much time are you spending wastefully? And how much time are you spending on behaviors that actually lead to productive results?
Be brutal in your analysis. Then, prepare a strategy for eliminating the time wasters. Become intentional about maximizing your time on activities that produce sales.
2. What Are Your Buyers Saying?
A drop-off in sales is not always the fault of the salesperson. Sometimes the culprit is the product itself.
A salesperson “whining” that the reduction in sales is not their fault will often fall on deaf ears at the managerial level – unless the salesperson can back up their claims with data.
So, quantify what’s happening. Record how many prospects you are seeing and the frequency of certain objections. If you can show management that enough people have a particular problem with your product or process they are much more likely to pay attention!
3. What’s Happening with Your Competition?
This is another way to isolate variables to see what’s happening in your market.
“The competition isn’t selling either,” isn’t an excuse for poor sales performance. But a quick check-in to find out what’s happening with your competition can lead to uncovering trends that are occurring within the broader marketplace.
Maybe you discover the market is shifting and your business needs to figure out how to move with it. Maybe your particular market is cooling off, and you need to reconnect with consumers to determine what they do want and make strategic business adjustments.
Moving with the market is a characteristic of every high-performing company. And maybe you could be the spark that keeps your company from the slide toward market irrelevance.
In the end, a bad sales day (or even a bad sales week) is not the end of the world. But ignoring extended bad sales trends can lead to big problems.
Focus on your behaviors. Control what you can control. Keep up with what’s happening in your market and out-smart the competition. If you do, you’ll make the most of those bad sales days and become an even better sales professional.
