Sales and Marketing climate. You can’t sell ice cream in winter. I like to remind myself how outdated that school of thought is. It’s the same as applying irrelevant marketing techniques to your business in this day and age. As an ice cream salesman, your strategy needs to change when the weather changes. You need to employ suitable salespeople to communicate your new sales message.
The old “It’s hot, buy an ice cream” pitch is not going to work anymore. You need to come up with new and creative ways to communicate your marketing message.
No one likes to admit that they need help, especially if you’ve had previous successes that would blow the average person’s mind. But things have changed. And if you don’t change with them, you’re heading for an iceberg. I know that you have talent. You wouldn’t be in the position you are in right now if you didn’t. Now you just need to learn how to release that potential and adapt to the current sales market.
No excuses! Recession or no recession, the first step in this process is my “identify and rectify” formula. My father used to say that you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. I think that all of those years ago, he was trying to teach me understanding and perspective. I had to truly know what was going on within my business to keep it going, but at the same time I also had to know exactly what was happening outside of my business in order to streamline my message.
Without both lines of perspective, the business model breaks down. So how do you achieve massive success when the odds are stacked against you? How, then, do you become that business that makes a profit by using new and innovative sales strategies?
Imagine for a moment that you have set up the most amazing business, with 100 staff members, pristine work areas and phones ringing off the hook. Now imagine that your office has a tall glass window leading out into the street. If you invite three different clients who have never dealt with you before to stand outside of that window in order to get an impression of your business and services, what do you think each would say?The first might be taken with how busy everyone seems but doesn’t like how your staff members eat lunch at their desks. The second might comment on the two staff members who were constantly flirting with each other, while the third may not notice anything except for how clean the window is.
