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Direct Sales Strategies: 3 Easy Ways to Overcome a Sales Slump and Get Back to Successful Selling

Guest post by: Jon Gilge

Article Overview: If you are in the midst of a slump, you know you have to get out of it, and fast. After all, selling is how you make your living and without sales you are without income. While we will all go through sales slumps from time to time, and to some degree some minor slumps are inevitable, the key is to get out of them fast when they do occur. Use these three tips to do just that.

Direct Sales Strategies: 3 Easy Ways to Overcome a Sales Slump and Get Back to Successful Selling

3 Ways To Get Out of a Sales Slump Fast

We all have sales slumps: Those times when you just can’t find your selling rhythm. When you can’t seem to close the sale despite your best effort. When each sale that you do get seems much harder than than it ever was before. When you are working harder than ever but your volume is down and the pressure is on. This phenomenon is not unique to sales. In economics it is called a correction, a recession, or even a depression. In sports it is a slump or a cold streak. In life it is a “rough patch” or a rut. It poker it is a bad run.

If you are a sales person in the midst of a sales slump, you know you have to get out of it, and fast. After all, selling is how you make your living and without sales you are without income. While we will all go through sales slumps from time to time the key is to minimize them when they do occur, and get out of them fast.

The problem is, sales slumps have a way of self perpetuating, with the lack of sales eroding our confidence and expectations of positive results, which in turn makes it even more difficult to return to the good form we have lost along the way.

How does a sales slump start? Usually a sales slump starts by chance, an unfortunate set of circumstances or bad luck that costs us a sale or two. Why it continues has to do with the self perpetuating nature of a slump. When those bad circumstances cost us a sale, rather than recognizing the short lived circumstances as the cause, and that it should not last as an impediment to future sales, we quickly start to develop a negative expectation based on them.

The external circumstances tend to become internal circumstances because our reaction to it internalizes it in our mind where it becomes an expectation going forward. So what happened to start the slump remains in our mind after the circumstance itself has gone away, and continues to cause the slump even though the circumstance in no longer present. We are having a sales slump because of the expectation created by a limited circumstance or run of bad luck remains in our mind long after the circumstance itself.

This is encouraging in that there is most often nothing external creating the sales slump, and if we can restore a positive expectation we can get out of the sales slump. It’s not that this is easy, but since it is internal and entirely controllable it is something that we can get out of quickly.

Here are 3 steps to get out of a sales slump.

Keep swinging Going into July of 1942 Joe DiMaggio, one of baseball’s greatest hitters, was in the midst of a massive hitting slump. His season average was .268 meaning he was failing to get a hit almost 3 out of 4 trips to the plate. In his career he had never batted under .330.

This is what Joe said about getting out of his slump:

“I’m also convinced the only way to get out of a slump is to stay in there and keep swinging. Nobody can help you. I’ll bet at least 100 players gave me advice during the season and no two had the same idea”

I think that this is good advice in two ways.

First, you have to keep swinging, or in sales keep getting in front of prospects, keep presenting, keep up all the activities that lead to sales. Often, the tendency for slumping sales people is to stop doing the things that make sales. Out of a sense of futility they stop engaging in sales activities. “What’s the use,” they think, “I can’t seem to make a sale no matter what I do.” This extends the slump because by taking yourself out of sales activities you are decreasing the odds that you will find the success that will get you out of the slump. The more you are in front of customers the greater the odds of a ‘normal’ mix of customers- some that will buy and some that won’t. By limiting the number of prospects you see, the chances are much greater that you could get a few bad ones and none of the goods ones.

I also like how DiMaggio rejected the advice of the 100′s of players that gave him advice. This is important advice for salespeople trying to break out of a sales slump. If you have been successful then you know what to do to be successful again. You just need to keep doing it. If you change what you are doing based on the various advice of everyone who wants to help, you will end up with a way of selling that may not work for you, and one that would probably be so disjointed as to not have the cohesion required to bring success.

Image if DiMaggio had taken the advice of those 100′s of well intentioned players and made the changes that each of them suggested. The result would not be the swing that made him great up until that point, and the swing that saw him finish the season batting back over .300. If your “sales swing” has made you successful it will again if you, like Joe, keep swinging the way you know works.

Give yourself a reset When you are in a sales slump, the pressure really starts to mount. When you are faced with a situation where you have not sold in awhile it becomes very difficult to see how you will get out of the hole you are in. Let’s say you normally close 5 out of 10 prospects. You start a month 0 for 10 over the first week and know that to get back to the 50% conversion that you are accustomed to you will have to sell your next ten prospects in a row, or 15 out of your next 20. The can seem impossible and cause you to give up hope in turning things around in time to reach your goals for the month.

Rather than let the pressure of getting out of the sales slump diminish your motivation, give yourself a reset. By this I mean reset your sales statistics to zero for zero and start the month over. Reset your goals from today forward as if the first week never happened and go forward with a fresh start. Now you have eliminated the overwhelming challenge of digging out of the hole you are in and put yourself in a position to move forward without all the pressure at your normal rate of success. Sometimes you just need to take the pressure of, allow yourself to forget the slump by putting it behind you, and start with a clean slate.

If you are a sales manager you can occasionally do this for members of your team who are slumping. Take the pressure off by giving them a reset, and let them know that you are forgetting their sales slump and evaluating their performance going forward. I’ve seen many salespeople respond very positively when the manager takes the pressure off by letting them start over, often times reaching new heights in performance.

Break your patterns Sometimes a sales slump is as much about about mental fatigue as it is about anything else. Break this fatigue and refresh yourself by changing your patterns. This piece of advice may sound contrary to my first suggestion that you keep on swinging without making changes to what has made you successful in the past, but it really isn’t.

I’m not telling you to change the way you sell, but to change some one thing that will indicate to your mind that things are changing: Wear your watch on the other wrist, get a new haircut, have oatmeal for breakfast instead of a banana, take a new route to work, or listen to loud music instead of talk radio. Often times the breaking of one pattern contributes to the breaking of other patterns, including that of poor sales performance.

In the profession of sales we will all occasionally find ourselves in a sales slump. When that happens a true professional will recognize it early and then take the steps needed to minimize the slump, and turn it around fast. I hope these suggestions help.

Fantastic Selling

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About the Author: Jon Gilge RSS for Jon's articles - Visit Jon's website Jon Gilge is the publisher of the popular Sales Giant Training Sales Blog that you can read here: Sales Training Blog and the author of the FREE 'Master Closing Guide' that you can download instantly at Overcoming Objections Guide. For more information on all of their sales training resources, including free sales training videos, please visit them at their online home at www.salesgianttraining.com Click here to visit Jon's website More from Jon Gilge One-Call Close Sales Guide

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