SalesHQ

Sales Tips >> Browse Articles >> Sales Tips

Succeed in the New Economy: Engage Your Offense

So what does this kind of perseverance entail in your organization? It could mean that you might have to spend an extra hour in the office making sales calls. Maybe you’ll need to add just three more calls to your daily quota. It could also mean that you need to attend more networking events and be in front of more customers. It could also mean that you’re on the road a little bit more often, spending one extra day meeting with prospects, developing more partnerships, and finding more suppliers. The biggest investment here is your time and only your willingness to persevere is going to keep you committed to this aggressive new strategy.

The importance of being there.

As I suggested earlier in this article, there’s another important benefit to engaging an offence-based sales strategy. You’re making a powerful statement to your customers about the kind of business you’re running or representing. By being a presence in the marketplace—out there spending time and energy with your clients while the competition is retreating—you’re going to be seen as an attractive choice compared to others. Remember, economic uncertainty tends to make people cautious and risk-averse. As I mentioned early on in this series of articles, your task as sales professional is to prove to your customers that buying from you is a good choice—one that reduces or even eliminates risk.

People want to be associated with winners, so it’s important that you don’t create a vacuum into which your customers might make some incorrect assumptions about your business or your sales team. That’s the real risk inherent in a retreat-based strategy. Your absence gets noticed and before you know it, people stop calling you simply because they don’t know whether you’re still around.

By choosing a strong offence-based sales strategy in this new economy, you’re making a decision to stick with proven methods that help you and your organization sell to more people in less time. There’s more happening at a deeper level as well. The word offence (beyond the sports metaphor) comes from the Latin word offensa, or “a striking against.” What you’re really striking against is a mindset that would otherwise trick you into doing exactly what the other 80% of sales people will do in this market—retrench and give up too early well before the real opportunities reveal themselves.

Keep plugging away at your sales calls and at your prospecting efforts, and keep mining your network. The opportunities are there if you’re willing to commit for the long haul. As Winston Churchill famously once said in a pivotal speech to his countrymen: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

---