Don’t sell during this recession: educate, inform and learn

Currently due to the recession:
- The number of potential sales deals you have in your pipeline is minimal.
- It has never taken so long to close a sale.
- The number of sales you close has never been so low.

Change attitude into a “Not selling” mode

Instead of wasting your time on pushing people and purchasers to buy why not focus your attention (or your sales force attention) to efforts that bring you into contact with potential future customers in your market:
- Informing companies in your market about methods and solutions.
- Meeting with them in order to discus problems and solutions.
- Give free seminars on market matters.
- Keep the communication going.
- Ask advice about problems and existing solutions.
- Ask input about the solutions you propose.
- Ask how well or bad your solutions could fit.
- Give some free consulting.
- Offer free useful data in a white paper concerning your market.

These are not real pre-sales activities but efforts preparing for pre-sales, preparing for when the economy picks up again.

Inform and educate instead of selling

The idea is that you bring and explain your solutions to them in order to be first on their mind when the problem arises or is still there when economy and business picks up again.
If you are communicating with potential future customers you are already have build a relationship and trust with them before the potential sales presents itself.

Thus instead of getting ever more frustrated by putting efforts into companies and people that aren’t going to buy soon, put your efforts into communicating with them in order to have your solution remembered and be present when the first occasion of a potential deal occurs.

You choose: to sell or not to sell

If you just try to sell over and over again when there is no budget or any possibility for a purchase, the potential future customer could get fed up with you or your company.
If instead you approach them with the goal to bring information or educate them and to learn from them, then you will be received and appreciated differently.

How about your sales efforts? Any success?
Why not switch to not having the intention to sell instead?