Top 3 Tips for Breaking Your Sales Slump

In a previous post, we covered Sales Fails, highlighting the fact that salespeople are pretty talented at telling anyone who will listen to us about how great we’re doing. But if you have an honest conversation with anyone who has carried a bag, they’ll tell you that there’s an ebb and flow associated with the effectiveness of their sales efforts.

When you’re hot, you’re hot. 🔥
When you’re not, well — you can be ice cold. ⛄

So when the inevitable cold spell hits, what are some things that you can do to ensure that it doesn’t last for a prolonged period of time?

Go for a Walk

If you’re in one of those ruts where seemingly nothing is going your way, try and create a bit of distance from your work — albeit for a brief period of time. Get out of your office or workspace for a bit, get outside, and clear your head. Doing this has an interesting effect, where we are able to eliminate some of the noise that’s cluttering out minds to create the necessary bandwidth and focus to get back on track.

To be clear, this isn’t about outright unplugging yourself from the reality and running (er — walking) away from a challenge. Give yourself a quick, 15-20 minutes where you’re away from the screen, play some calming music, and do breathing exercises.

Think of it as a quick meditative cleanse to flush out some of the negativity and start anew.

Listen to Call Recordings

This is a simple, yet elegant — and grossly underutilized — way for sales reps to catch bad habits all by themselves.

As sales reps, we have some built-in cognitive dissonance associated with the things we think we’re doing/saying, and what’s actually playing out. Time and again, we operate on this assumption that we’re running the playbook effectively, when in reality we may be a bit off the rails.

And in our experience, one of the most effective ways to spot these missteps is by simply listening to our prospect interactions. Professional athletes watch game film constantly. Why should we be any different?

The approach we like to take here is to bucket types of conversations in one session. Start with your prospecting calls, and identify ones that have gone well, “eh” examples, and bad ones. Listen, re-listen, pause and take notes.

Then, turn to discovery calls — do the same thing.
Then, turn to your demos, your closing/negotiation calls.

You’re bound to uncover examples of things that stand out to you; missed opportunities to ask questions or meet an objection head on, filler words, inactive listening where it’s apparent you’re just waiting to speak as opposed to actually hearing what your prospect is saying.

Pinpoint with Metrics

Your CRM isn’t just for staying organized and on top of your prospect interactions + pipeline. The data that resides within your CRM tells a unique story that should serve as a rudder to shed light on where, specifically within your sales funnel you are succeeding or falling short.

Use this.

Let the data tell the objective story as to what’s going well and what isn’t. Data has a funny way of breaking through the noise of what we tell ourselves to be true and what is actually going on. Benchmark yourself against not only yourself, but your peers to identify which areas of your sales funnel need a bit of love. If you’re struggling with qualification, seek out those that are performing better, ask them questions, join their calls.

This is about using the quantitative measures to uncover the qualitative pieces that you can improve upon to break out of your slump.