By Grant Cardone
October 1, 2009
The economy is problematic, it is challenging, and it is much more difficult, but it is not the problem. And anyone that identifies the economy as the problem will never find the solution or identify the opportunity that this contracting economy provides for their business.
That is right, this economy provides opportunities! But first, back to the problem. While it is true that the economy is in a major retraction, businesses and individuals are finding it difficult to sell their products and services because credit and free money has disappeared. For decades, businesses and individuals became overly dependent upon artificial stimulus and quit training their people to effectively sell their products and services. Ten percent of all consumer products last year were bought from the funding that came from refinancing a home. That is gone today.
Now the company or sales person must actually do a better job at: 1) finding a qualified customer, 2) building value in their products and/or services and 3) closing the transaction. For the last 10 years, selling skills and sales training lost out to advertising and gimmicks that left America with a ‘lost’ skill set. Herein lies the problem and the opportunity.
Selling is the weakness of every business. The name of the game again is Selling and must become the priority of the company from the CEO to the sales teams including every employee. This is no longer something the salespeople do, but should be the attention of every position in the company.
Every company and every job today is dependent upon the revenue generated from the selling of products/services as the company can no longer cut cost in order to achieve profits. The easy money is gone from the landscape, so this requires every member of the company to learn how to generate an opportunity, build value and close a deal. Selling skills are the fundamental backbone to the solvency of every company and the determining factor between failure and success.
I was recently interviewed by a major newspaper where I made a claim that I could increase the sales of any company in any industry by 20 percent by merely getting the company’s attention on the right thing. The individual doing the interview said, “How can you make that claim in this economy when people are not buying anything?”
The fact is that people are buying, but they are just more selective. The truth is that companies are not doing a better job of prospecting, follow up, selling and closing. We have companies that are up anywhere from 30 percent to 150 percent over last year by merely putting their attention on and keeping their attention on how to drive revenue. When you put all your attention on the right thing and understand the economy is NOT the problem and get everyone thinking in terms of solutions not problems, you will get results. Planning, organizing, economic forecasting and board meetings will not get you revenue.
For any company this push must start when the CEO and management decides to gain market share, then pushes all initiatives at developing new skills and becomes unreasonable with the execution of new actions and ideas. The companies that we see moving the needle have decided four basic things:
(1) to gain market share,
(2) not use market conditions as an excuse to settle for other results,
(3) to disagree with the actions and thinking of the majority of the market,
(4) get help from outside to hold the company accountable for new actions.
The economy today should be seen as the opportunity, not the problem. Identify the correct problem, solve it and then you will see the company recreating itself. The real problem today is that those that make up the economy (each of us) lack the skill set and abilities to generate leads for your products, get in front of those prospects, and sell your products. After years of easy money and easy credit, business people have lost their determination and work ethic and somehow misplaced the willingness to do whatever it takes to grab market share. While that sounds quite dire, this truth holds true for your best competitors which is your biggest advantage in this economy. Become willing to do what your competitor refuses to do and you will grab market share and learn that economic contractions are opportunities for the committed to expand and conquer.
It is impossible to be in business for any length of time and not experience a shrinking economy. The good news is twofold: (1) there are exact and precise actions that you can take to counter any contraction, and (2) contractions are excellent opportunities to gain market share.
Remember that the economy may be problematic, but it is not the problem. The solution today is to make sales training, sales skills, and selling the first thing focused on every day and the priority of every person in the company from the CEO to every employee.
Grant Cardone is an international sales expert and the author of Sell to Survive. He has developed multiple sales programs that have affected thousands of sales organizations and billions of dollars in retail sales. His developments in sales management, business production and sales performance encompass the basics of selling.