Is Sales “Selling Smart” In These Days of “Pent-Up” Customer Demand?

77 % 

That’s the number of CEOs – consulting giant Deloitte reported recently - who say they expect their organizations growth to be strong over the next 12 months. 

Further, “almost 40 % expect accelerated or pent – up consumer demand to drive business success this year! “ 

Now let me ask you, is your sales organization taking best advantage of this great opportunity? 

And with the explosion of new social platforms plus customers sharing everything and anything online, sales prospects do a lot of their homework today – more than they ever did frankly - before finally talking V2V with a company’s salesforce these days.  

In fact they’re almost 2/3’s of the way through the sales cycle before they engage with sales according to just – published research. 

Not much time to take advantage of this pent-up demand thing, huh? 

Time was only a few years ago when a company looking to buy a new product had a sales person “guide” them through all the facts and features, customer reviews 
(always favorable, of course!) and so on form the very beginning of the “sales cycle”.  

No more.  

You need to make some serious adjustments.  

So, with “face time” collapsing – really “shortening” – where are we today?  What’s sales’ new strategy?  

Obviously, sales has to make every “decision moment” count, right? I mean with even the best sales folks closing only one in three deals, knowing how to “supercharge” customer value at every sales decision moment has become paramount!  

So, as I always do at this point, let me now give you a few business suggestions for operating in this new environment of accelerated demand.  

Business Tip # 1. Have a Plan for Pent – Up Demand where you’re poised to quickly take advantage of this “heated up” environment. All hands on deck and sales qualifying prospects as they hit the radar.  

Tip # 2. Lay out your company’s “Customer Decision Map” so you’ll begin to see how much time you need to make up and to better understand “where you joined the decision cycle”. And Salesforce predicts that 37% of companies will start implementing “ Customer Journey Mapping” this year – time for you to do yours! 

So that’s about it for me today. 

Until we kick these things around again together. 

Ciao.