Are You Recession Ready?
Episode 3 – Sales Process

Episode Transcript

Alex Chan | Paul O’Donohue

I have a question for you. If you’re a business owner or CEO, Are You Recession Ready?  This session discusses step number three  –  Sales Process of the SalesStar nine step High-Performance Pathway. And, as always, here to help us to go through this topic is our CEO and founder of SalesStar, Paul O’Donohue. Paul, you’re back again. Good to see you. And can you help us to navigate the step number three of the nine step High-Performance Pathway? Tell us about the sales process and how that helps us to become recession ready.

Well, this is one of my favorite subjects, Alex. You know, we’ve learned a lot through going through two recessions as to what happens to buyer behavior. Right? So, buyer behavior fundamentally changes people. The people we’re selling to often make more considered decisions. So, sales cycles blow out. Right? And often the person that we’re selling to can lead to selling to a committee as opposed to selling to any one individual. So, those are some of the subtle changes. Right? So, fundamentally, what happens when buyer behavior changes, our sales process needs to change and needs to adapt. So, in order to win the war and market share in tough economic conditions, we’ve got to be on our game. So the sales process is absolutely vital and critical that we rinse everything we can to improve our effectiveness. So, one of the things we need to be mindful of is our cash conversion cycle. So cash is king. We need cash in a business. We need predictable sales. And you can’t predict and forecast accurately if you don’t have an effective, milestone centric sales process that you can rely on.

So, with cash conversion cycle, Paul, you’re referring to the time it takes to initiate a sales enquiry right through to close, right through to manufacture, right through to delivery, right through to invoice. That’s that time period from your start to actually getting money in, is that right?

That’s correct, Alex. It’s – it’s how do you take a lead and how do you get money in the bank? Really, that’s your cash conversion cycle and the sales process, like when sales cycles have prolonged it impacts your sales,  cash conversion cycle quite significantly.

Yeah, because there’s a cost the longer it goes. So, that, cash conversion cycles, a great tip, thank you very much for that. So is there any advice that you’ve got for our viewers in terms of maybe what they can do in order to help themselves get recession ready with their process?

Start thinking about your sales process. Start thinking about efficiencies. Start thinking about reducing cost of sales. What did we learn through the pandemic? We learned that using or going from traditional sales to digital sales really helped us improve sales effectiveness and get the costs down. How so, you might be asking? Well, there was use of prospecting using LinkedIn strategies, but having discovery meetings on Zoom, you know, traditional selling was all about going out and seeing you prospects, a lot of time spent traveling, a lot of time wasted. But imagine now, how many discovery meetings and how many presentation meetings you can have just by using video based selling. So that’s one thing. If you’re not using that, I would strongly recommend thinking about changing with the times because your prospects are more susceptible to meeting you online and to having those video conversations. We just need to position the meeting well, we need to give them a reason why we should meet. And that all comes down to your strategic messaging, and it’s all part of the plan we talked about in the earlier video.

Yeah. So what I’m taking out of this, Paul, is that on one hand, we need to adapt our sales process. Because a customer’s process tends to be more extended these days, because they take longer to make decisions during recessions, it’s partly driven because they make committee based decisions. But all the while, we need to balance that with trying to shorten our cash conversion cycle. And that’s the challenge, isn’t it?

It is. Some of the challenges that we’ll touch on today, Alex.

Okay. So, look, have you got an offer for our viewers?

Oh, yes, Alex. Well, there is actually a sales process book. It’s called Supercharge your Sales Process. There’s a white paper there, download it. It’s a fantastic book and I’m sure you’ll get a lot of gold nuggets from that.

Fantastic. So to our viewers, if you want to know more, remember to reach out to a SalesStar High-Performance coach. We’re here to help and follow the series to get the full overview on how to be recession ready as we continue our journey through the SalesStar nine step High-Performance pathway. Remember also to watch out for key strategic moves later in this series. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.