What Are Your Sales Challenges In 2009?

[Skip Anderson]

I'm interested to know what your sales challenges are as we enter the new year. Where are you having the most trouble? What are you trying to accomplish in your business but haven't been able to yet? What's on your plate given the state of the economy? What sales training issues are you facing?

Let's talk about it here in this forum and see if we can help each other out.

[onlinesales]

We had a difficult end of 2008 but have seen things really start to pickup in the last two months. We are in the service industry building custom websites and do about 1000 per month. Their seems to be a trend of people venturing out on there own either out of necessity because they cant find work or because they need to earn additional income. If you have a product that can be packaged towards newly starting businesses I would take the time to do so. Probably a good time to consider resellers, affilliates etc.

[bgqw08]

I think the biggest problem we are having is trying to convince companies that our product actually saves money and the ROI can be recouped in usually a month or two. That leaves plenty of time for companies to use the software to become more efficient and save time and money in 2009. It seems most companies are taking a wait and see approach and only spending money when they feel it absolutely necessary.

[Tape Guy]

The state of the economy has cut back on production of many of the things that our product goes into.

One of our biggest users is the automotive industry and they simply aren't putting out the production like they have.

So we need to find industries and customers that buy our product that don't know about us.

We also like everyone else need to sharpen our pencil on business we were not able to secure because of price. If we don't fill our burden bucket with sales dollars we will run into problems many manufacturing facilities already have with a lack of work.

[Vortex6700]

Many of my sales calls have ended up with me leaving empty handed due to the fact that many of the business owners I contact have taken the first thing someone has said about my industry first hand and did not do any research or listen to anyone afterward.

Therefore, my biggest problem is convincing the customer that thier friend Billy Bob might not have a degree in the area and could have left a few points out.

It seems that this is due to the fact that the economy has nearly destroyed my primary consumer (used car dealerships) and they are so caught up with the fact that they might not be in business next month that they forget to do anything about it. (or maybe they don't think anything can be done about it)



-Corey