How to Reinvent Your Business to Achieve Growth During a Slump

For most businesses, success largely depends on their sales. That being the case, there is no doubt that you would care about sales optimization and analysis more than anything else. Unfortunately, most businesses lag in their sales department.

If you want to improve your sales and do well in today's competitive business landscape, you have to pay attention to this division. Do course corrections where sales efforts do not yield desirable results. This may demand reinventing the sales process as a whole.

Opting for personalized interactions that are dynamic and useful can be advantageous for improving sales. At the same time, you can tap into influencers, platforms, and offering various buying options to improve sales and fulfill your purpose.

According to marketing expert and entrepreneur Eric J Dalius, the sales process's complex nature can make reinvention goals a bit challenging. You can face difficulty with hiring or discovering the best talent. More than this, it can be tough to come to terms with the fact that enterprise sales must continue at a higher pace.

That being said, reinventing your business to achieve sales growth, even during a slump such as the one brought by the global COVID-19 pandemic, is still possible.

Tips for Successful Business Reinvention to Boost Sales

Here are a few areas to restructure and suggestions to help with enhancing your business’ sales operations:

1. Get candidate hiring right

Getting the right salespeople from the beginning can be a boon for your bottom line and business sales. Usually, people outsource this responsibility to recruitment agencies.

While that might work for some businesses, if you are not getting desired sales numbers, consider giving this task back to your in-house sales team.

Work with your HR people to identify the best candidates for sales roles, following strict guidelines involving qualification, hard and soft skills, expertise, and the prospect's workplace culture fit.

HR professionals can help narrow down your search to the most suited and qualified candidates to handle your business’ sales operations. Dedicated in house sales teams might understand your business better and offer better services that grow your sales.

2. Manage cash flow better

Monitoring and managing cash flow properly is one of the most common challenges that many businesses grapple with, especially during bad times. If you are well prepared and manage cash flow well, the slowdowns may not matter much.

Preparedness starts with having enough cash saved for emergencies and to cushion business slumps. Your savings account should have enough liquidity to support you for about six months. If your general monthly expense is $1,000, you should manage your expenditure and save a minimum of at least $3,000.

Similarly, your business account should be able to bear the cost of your employees for six months and even more. If you haven’t taken care of these things, it’s time you reassess your actions and adopt proper measures accordingly.

As part of improving and managing your cash flow, cut unnecessary business costs, stay on top of invoicing, tighten credit requirements, adopt better payment options including mobile payments, and so on to  ensure that the amount of cash coming in compares in a healthy and positive way with the amount of cash going out.

3. Improve leadership style

If business is hurting and sales are low, it's time to analyze your leadership style and whether it is inspiring the right business actions and sentiments. Simple leadership adjustments and corrections of shortcoming can go a long way in reinvigorating things.

Check your own attitude and mood as team leader, as well as your employee reward system. These tend to have an incredible impact on the entire workplace vitality.

Practice discipline and try and keep everything positive in the business, including by giving and encouraging constructive criticism. This can have an outsize impact on employees’ mood and consequently on their sales performance.

Develop situational awareness. Before you hold someone else responsible, look at yourself and figure out if you didn't communicate a specific idea correctly, which caused an issue. Start by correcting your own shortfalls then move on down the chain.

Remember to keep everything positive and constructive. Grumpiness, constant blaming, and negative attitudes throughout are bad for workplace culture, employee motivation, and customer engagement – all of which impact sales and business success.

4. Adopt a customer-centric approach

Business should assign salespeople to specific customer groups to bring more alignment and better personalized service delivery and attention to customers. It should come from the understanding that one person cannot take care of every need. Hence, you need to identify customer needs and give their responsibility to a person who can manage them well.

A customer-centric approach leads to healthier relationships with customers, more customers satisfaction, which grows and encourages return customers to your business. It is a better, more meaningful approach than being strictly transactional and only focused on your own bottom line. 

Anticipate customer needs, collect customer feedback, be accessible and look beyond the purchase. Focuses instead on creating a truly positive experience for the customer by maximizing service and/or product offerings, as well as building healthy, long-term relationships with them. It will reflect positively on your business sales and growth.

5. Build more trust

One essential aspect of running a successful business is you must build trust with all your partners, including your employees, customers, and vendors. When employees have the assurance that you believe in them, it boosts their self-drive and workplace energy. 

EJ Dalius says that you will have to convey to your employees that you trust them with the job they are tasked with and demonstrate to them that they are pillars in your organization.

To cultivate trust in your business, work on improving communication, commitment, and competence with everyone involved in the business. Tell the truth always, respect everyone’s time, and keep your word always. Deliver and expected or in a much better way.

Be sure to explain your thought process and involve people as necessary in decision making. It makes people feel part and parcel of the business. They feel both technically and emotionally invested in the success of the business, which compels them to put their best foot forward for the business. Trust is the social glue that holds business relationships together.

In conclusion

Treat your people as valued partners in your business. Dalius stresses that the first quality of a successful manager is to identify the strengths, needs, weaknesses, and interests of the employees. Then focus on nurturing the strengths and improving on the weaknesses to empower every employee for optimum performance in their sales roles. 

Dalius goes further to stress the importance of treating employees as separate individuals. When you treat your employees as individuals and give preference to their needs and requirements, it helps build positive sentiments and motivates them to do better.

In the end, you have to align performance and customer value to bolster satisfaction so that your business achieves its sales goals and is able to reach new heights.

Success of any organization depends upon proper coordination and interaction between the employer, employees, and customers. Healthy relationships will lead to healthy sales.