It a sure sign that summer’s here: Sun is shining, birds are chirping, kids are playing, sales are slumping (?!?!?).
What was that? you say. Sales slumping? That’s right, 68% of businesses report a drop in sales over the summer months. Now, I can buy that some of those businesses may actually be seasonal, but 68%? Surely not.
But if you think about it, summer is full of productivity killing (but certainly fun!) distractions: vacations, beaches, backyards, patios, etc. And, if productivity is down, sales are sure to follow.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. As a manager, I’ve been faced with this obstacle myself, and have come up with a few ways to overcome this challenge.
1) Intelligently stream responsibility:
- Forget about a vacation “out of office” message
- Make sure people who reach out to you in your absence are handled appropriately, whether that’s with an autoresponder or a live call— delegate a human to make this assessment.
2) Set up a predictable lead nurture program ahead of time for your active pipeline.
- Work with your marketing department (or services like Boxpilot 🙂 ) to make sure you have a preset contact stream going out.
- Schedule emails and/or calls with targeted messages to go out on a preset schedule.
3) Keep your cold outreach going out—your funnel will thank you.
- Work with marketing to have daily calls and emails scheduled so that it’s like you are not gone.
- People worry about not being there to accept response, but the fact is, response rates are low, and lower still are the number of people who are ready to buy after that first response.
- Have cold outreach responses fed to a auto responder campaign or a live call (see #1 above).
It may seem beastly to administer, but without it, sales slump. The best place to start is by having Sales and Marketing sit down together to lay out responsibility. Utilizing external support from a service provider, may be the best option to solving this problem without headaches—let the 3rd party enable coverage.
Putting effort into building a great system will not only make a difference this summer, but any slump period your business typically has.