Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

No need to go into a lot of detail about how the fall of 3 financial giants impacts sales and selling of financial products across the country.  If you are in the banking, investments or any financial services business, your clients and prospects are more than a little hesitant to buy your sales pitch.

On Tuesday September 16^th your pipeline automatically shrunk, and anyone that was close to buying is now either back on the fence, or clearly over the fence and running the other way.  Your intense qualifying of any new prospects has to include their appetite for buying in an uncertain marketplace.

A year ago, only a few people in ‘the know' would have predicted that three financial giants would fall within a week of each other.  Look at the stats of these companies:

Can you believe it?  In an instant they are gone, Poof.  Sure, their names still exist, but the entities are gone.  The financial pendants and experts are saying that they just forgot the fundamentals in pursuit of short term, high payoff risky business.  They diversified into areas and ignored basic principles, which made them great, and provided sustainability.  One of the company's websites talks about ‘doing the right thing' and ‘sustainability'; so much for marketing talk.

What are you counting on to sustain your business?  Are you counting on:

• Your Brand
• Your years in the business
• Your current revenue stream that makes you financially comfortable

Here's an idea.  If you want to make sure that your sales business doesn't collapse in a heap overnight, make sure that you are counting on these 3 critical sales fundamentals:

1. Prospect for NEW business from NEW clients every day
2. Qualify your prospects for compelling reasons to buy; time, money and resources to invest; and decision making ability
3. Make sure that the opportunities in your pipeline look like the top 10% of your current book of business, and every time you sell one, eliminate one of the accounts in the bottom 10%.

Focus on these fundamentals and your business will thrive in any economic environment.