Wake Up Summer Sales: Dealing with Unresponsive Prospects, Diagnosing Sales Slowdowns

Have the summer doldrums hit your sales department? Do you and your sales reps need an infusion of enthusiasm, sales smarts and practical advice? Then jump into this refreshing pool of cool blog posts to jolt everybody awake again.  The VAR Guy’s sales expert, Kendra Lee.

KLA Group’s Kendra Lee is a sales expert who blogs over at The VAR Guy, and she also happens to be an award winning sales consultant, author and, yes, sales representative (she got her knowledge in the trenches). She’s been sharing her wisdom for free with readers over at The VAR Guy for more than a year. The following are recent highlights that may help your business, too:

Dealing with unresponsive sales prospects. Unresponsive sales prospects can be some of the most frustrating you encounter. Do you throw them away? Do you keep trying? While these prospects may be a little more work, they aren’t a lost cause. Here’s what you need to do.

Summer is the perfect time to gain an edge in sales prospecting. Why not kick back and enjoy the mojitos this summer? Maybe because that’s what your competition is doing under the faulty assumption that prospective customers are vacationing all summer long. This is the United States, not Europe, so get a leg up on the competition and get out there. Summer is the perfect time for prospecting.

To hound or not to hound? You need to stay top of mind with customers and prospects, and your sales manager may be pushing you to touch base more often than you do. But how much hounding is too much hounding? Here are some tips to help you strike the right balance to develop strong connections that lead to relationships and sales.

Tips for your mid-year sales performance assessment. We’re more than halfway through 2013. which means we have less than six months to hit annual revenue targets. Are you ahead of pace, on pace or behind the ball? While some sales pros may wait until October or November to check their pace, you’re smarter than that. You know that summer is the perfect time for a mid-year sales performance assessment.  Here are five questions to make sure you’re on target.

Sales slowdown triage. Have sales to new customers slowed down? Here’s where to look to diagnose the problem, plus some thoughts on quick fixes plus longer-term strategies.

Industry conferences are for networking, not texting. Do you or your sales people spend their time at industry events looking at your phones? If so, you are missing your opportunity to network. Why bother going to the conference if you just look at your phone the whole time. There are centuries worth of industry knowledge and best of the best practices available here if you just talk to other people. So put down that phone.