There are ups and downs in sales.
The ups are when you can barely keep up with all your interested prospects. Every pitch seems to be closing. All your warm leads that have been radio silent for weeks seem to come out of hiding all at once. You’re riding an emotional high and dreaming of your commission check.
The downs, on the other hand, are when you can hear crickets in the sales pit and revenue has ground to a halt. Your phone isn’t ringing with inbound, there are no new inquiries in your inbox, and nobody’s signing up using the self-checkout links.
The downs are when it’s time to get to work.
When my reps are a little behind their pacing number, I have them send me daily recaps with the following:
- Daily pacing number to hit their monthly quota
- How much revenue they closed today
- What they’re going to do differently tomorrow (if they didn’t hit their pacing number today)
In her daily recap from yesterday, one of my reps said, “Sales is all about ebb and flow and I know that, following a low day, there’s a storm of revenue brewing.”
I smiled ear to ear when I read this. First, because she’s already giving herself the same feedback that I would have given her (a strong sign for a future manager). And because it’s SO true!
When revenue dips, don’t focus on revenue. One of my old bosses used to call this “gripping the bat too tight.” This is when you’re going into every closing call like it might be your last. The prospect feels the unhealthy pressure and you end up burning some of your best leads.
Instead, focus on the preliminary steps to revenue. Focus on your activity metrics (dials and emails) and pipeline management. These are the foundation of your sales process. When you’re in a slump, you have to build from the ground up.
It’s a natural undulation in sales. There will be times when you need to inject new leads, dial down, and rebuild your pipeline. Then you need to spend time focusing on getting all those leads through the sales cycle and closing them at the end. Then it’s back to the front of the pipe to set yourself up with more leads.
Where amateurs fail, is they will focus on the revenue number as their only metric of success. So they get down on themselves and lose steam when it’s really just time to switch gears and focus on the front end of their pipeline. A pro takes the lull in revenue as an opportunity to inject new leads and rebuild their pipeline.
Now, all the above advice applies to short-term dips in revenue. If your revenue performance declines consistently, there is a point when you might need to take a look at the later stages in your sales cycle (mainly pitching and closing). This depends on the length of your sales cycle.
(Side note: sales cycle length is the amount of time between your first touchpoint with a prospect and when the deal closes.)
For our org, the average sales cycle length is 3-5 days (we sell an insurance product, so our customers are usually only shopping when they have a short timeline).
For our sales cycle, if one of my rep’s has a revenue slump for one day, there’s no need for alarm. If their revenue dips for more than five days in a row, then we need to make a change.
This is because 5 days is the maximum amount of time that a rep would need to inject a batch of new leads into their pipeline and complete a full sales cycle with them.
For an org with a longer sales cycle (like a SaaS product with a 6-month or 1-year cycle), it’s even more difficult to analyze revenue on a shorter timeline. It may take 6 months or a year to determine if revenue has actually slumped, or if there might just be a backlog of good prospects in the pipeline.
But it’s also too risky to wait 6 months or a year, so you need to make an analysis of potential revenue that is currently in your pipeline. You can do so by multiplying potential deal value by conversion % (based on historical metrics).
In summary, if you’re a salesperson and your revenue dips, start by getting back to basics. Control the controllables and make sure you’re hitting your dial expectations and maintaining an organized pipeline.
Do this until your revenue performance has been low for more than one sales cycle. Then bubble up to your manager and ask for feedback on your pitching and closing.