How to Navigate Downturns in Your Business By Revitalizing Your Sales Strategies

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter podcast. This is your host, Jeani Ringkob, and I am really excited to have you here today because we're talking about some tough conversations that I've been having over the last few weeks with clients, with prospects, and with folks all over in the industry.

If you haven't experienced this yet, I think you're going to still want to stay tuned. If you have experienced it, stick with me and we're going to talk about approaches to it. I feel like it is a trend that everybody has forecasted a certain number for their business and they are off track.

Whether it's the weather that's caused delays, whether it's people just not doing the projects that you've had on the docket, they’re postponing work, they're just not writing new POs, all of these things seem to be leaning towards us filling what we probably knew was coming.

Inflation is hitting people hard. Everybody is concerned. It's a political year. We have the elections coming up. We're all filling it. But one of the things that I've been watching and seeing in the industry is that we're all starting to get a little bit lax in one of the very fundamental areas of our business.

If you think about The Business Hierarchy of Needs, it was created by Mike Michalowicz, it's a framework I love to reference, we have marketing and sales at the bottom.

I think sometimes we just call it sales, but really marketing should amplify your sales. It should be elevating it. It should make making it more cost-efficient. With the way the decision makers make decisions, you need to have that in place, building your brand and supporting your sales team. They go hand in hand.

If you don't have that, it's the oxygen that your business needs to survive, it's the cash that your business needs to survive. It's really critical that you shore that up in your business.

Over the previous years, we've been blessed. We've had a lot of demand in our industry and what I've seen is a lot of people have let sales team members go. They haven't been providing ongoing training. They haven't been learning new technologies.

Maybe some of them have left the company and they just haven't replaced them because they have plenty of business. The work is coming in. People are doing more and more work. They're not having to go find new customers consistently.

But when that stuff starts to slow down, when they start to push projects back, do smaller projects, instead of mill and fills, they're just doing overlays, all of those things happen. We knew that this was coming, so what do we need to do? We need to shore our businesses up and it's time to go back to the basics.

Do you have a really strong sales strategy and system in place for your business? Do you have inbound traffic? Are you attracting leads? What we're seeing is we're starting to see more and more inconsistent sales.

We don't want to have reliance on those big one-off projects. We need to know what the core of our business is. One of the things that we need to do to start evaluating this process and to put a strategic plan in place to make sure that we shore up the sales portion of our business is do you understand your offerings and do you understand your customer.

This is a great place to start. Which of your products really drive the most margin? What do you want a healthy pie to look like inside of your organization? You probably don't want 100% of those biggest-margin products and services, but you need to know what that is and you need to know who those buyers are.

This is probably a really good time to reconnect with buyers, figure out what their motivations are, understand has there been a shift in the values and core decision-making process of key decision makers.

As time moves, we have younger generations moving into that and consumers also get used to making decisions in different ways. Do you know what your products are? Do you know how they're currently aligning with pain points and with how decision-makers are making that decision?

The lack of focus on a strategy can really be the downfall to having a strong sales system and business development system inside of your business. So, ask yourselves these questions.

Look at your products. Which ones do you want to focus on? Maybe it's time to actually make an investment. I think about a company that I know is actually doing really well during this time.

They added a milling machine and really were able to do more of the work that some of their clients wanted and it made a huge difference. But if I also think about them, they are also very strategic on their marketing and sales.

They focus on inbound business development all the time. It is a priority in their business. They have it as a core strategy. They build systems and processes around it. They're measuring what success looks like.

They know how many new customers they need to be attracting and how much they need to be getting out of the lifetime customer value for their existing customers and how they're going to also retain them. When they can expect them to turn over and spend more money, they know what the value of each customer is to them.

That's because they have a specific strategy in place. For a lot of us, if we've seen that shift, we have had sales talent move out, age out of the process, and we just haven't filled those gaps, or we haven't trained up younger talent, or maybe they're just not the right fit anymore, it's time to shore that up.

Get a good idea of what your product and services are. Make sure you go back to the basics and understand your customer's pain points. If they're not purchasing, if they're delaying purchases, go and ask them why. Figure out what their pain points are. Likely nobody else is doing that.

This could be the beginning of a great sales strategy right there in and of itself. Go in and try to understand it from their perspective and help them build a plan and forecast out. It's going to help your business.

Here are a few questions to be asking yourself: Are you attracting enough new clients? Do you even know what the number needs to be annually and quarterly of new clients, brand new clients that you've never worked with before to ensure that as you have attrition and you lose existing clients or they fade away, whatever happens on that backside but also to support the growth of your business?

I always say, if you're not growing, you're dying. We can't afford to not have business development. We can't afford to not be having new clients and customers coming in to continually grow and reform our base inside of our business.

Then when we do attract those leads, are you converting enough of the right prospects into clients to support your sales needs? This is also really, really important, and you need to have numbers around this.

I always say, I should be able to ask a business owner or a sales manager how many leads are you attracting and are you converting enough of those and how are you measuring that and what is the frequency of measuring that?

Then we should even be able to go deeper in that conversation and talk about where are you finding them, how are you educating them, letting them know, like, and trust you and driving them closer and closer towards knowing that you're the one that needs to solve the problem?

Do you know what that whole customer journey from prospect to raving fan looks like and are you in control of as many touch points as possible? These are some of the questions that I ask in conversation when people start saying we're having inconsistent sales.

We forecasted $10, $12, $20, $30 million and instead we're at $5, $10, or $15 million for those numbers. That's the kinds of questions I start to ask. A lot of times what I'm hearing is they've had turnover for their sales, for their estimators. They had a really incredible year, but they don't have the estimators in place to really keep up that pace or the sales team to go out and nurture those relationships to keep up that pace.

They've let themselves lose track that they have to be focused on this all the time. How do we make sure that we shore ourselves up against this? We talked about some questions that you need to ask yourself that you need to make sure you can answer those questions inside of your business.

But then also what you need to think about is do you need to be investing in the sales portion of your business? Does this mean bringing in sales professionals? Does it mean training existing folks inside of your business? Sometimes some of the best talent I've found is people that have some aptitude characteristics but are working somewhere else inside of our organization.

Look for those first. Those are the easiest ones. But then you have to think about, do you have a talent brand that's going to be able to attract that sales talent that you need inside of your organization.

It's important that we have strong, talented sales folks that know our company, know what the strategy is, and they're loyal to that strategy. They feel supported and they know how they can drive success and they really feel connected to that success.

Is your sales team strong enough? Do you have the infrastructure in place in order to develop the business and convert the leads that you need to? More and more, I'm hearing that people feel like they have a gap in that. They're struggling to hire those key positions and they're having to get really creative.

Right now, they're leaning more heavily on folks inside of the company to pick up the slack there and their finding is that it seems to hurt across the board. Get a plan in place if you look at that talent portion of your business and you know that it's not there.

Secondly, make sure that you have marketing and branding in place and a strategy in place to amplify your sales team. Maybe you lost somebody or you don't have as much sales as you did before, but maybe you actually don't need more.

Maybe you could integrate marketing, content marketing, education, getting in front of folks through really strategic marketing things and efforts, creating that brand identity, helping them identify you, know what you do, how you solve the problem, why you're the best choice, creating awareness for them, and being that trusted brand that they're going to go to so that when they're ready to talk to your sales team, they're already much closer to that conversion already.

Let some of these things be doing the heavy lifting for your sales team and you might be actually able to get by with less in terms of that talent piece right there. When I think about having a strategic plan for sales, it's just the same as we think about having a higher-level strategy for anything else.

It can be incredible at getting you out of that place. It can guide you through a challenging moment and mention this, but it can really help your team focus. Once you bring in those salespeople, do they know what the overall objective is? Do they know what activities they need to be doing each and every day to drive that? Are you asking them to actually track and measure results?

These are really important things. They need to know what they need to be doing. If they're not seeing a certain number that you guys have set in place in your tracking at a certain frequency, they need to know that things are not moving in the right direction, but also put into place a way to support that sales team.

Understand what's working, what's not working. Is there something getting in your way? What are you hearing from them in terms of objections? Maybe we can tackle that through a piece of content, a case study, a video, something that can help them understand that, that you can share with them, that helps prepare them for when you do have that face-to-face conversation.

These are all things that we can learn and implement into building a better sales strategy. I think the companies that really go back to the basics on this, they answer the question: do we have enough prospects coming in? Are we converting enough of those prospects? How are we doing it? What are the tactics that we're doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis to ensure that we are going to have enough sales?

These are the things that go into building a sales and marketing strategy to ensure that you have the foundation piece of your business right. With a market like we're in, this is a great time to have that reality check. Go back to the basics.

If you feel like you're not shored up there, this is the time to get shored up right now. This is the time to start. If you're wondering what might the bottlenecks be, why might the gaps be, maybe it's sales and marketing, maybe it's profitability inside of your business, or maybe it's building a system around amplifying your sales team, we actually have a really great tool that'll help you identify where that gap is that you need to be focused in your business.

It's a quick assessment. It takes less than 10 minutes and you can grab that over at storybuilt.marketing/assessment. Go there, take the assessment, it's going to give you some results and then we will share more information with you or provide a resource.

You can always connect with me on LinkedIn. You can always grab a link on the website there at storybuilt.marketing, get some time on my calendar, and we can actually review those results together and give you some more insights into what it's going to take to build a strategy that you can rely on to grow your business.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that you are staying on top of this, that you're thinking about building that base, that sales base all the time, the oxygen that your business needs to keep growing.

Make sure that you subscribe and that you leave a review. This is a great way to make sure that you always get us popping up in your feed. We try to make sure that we meet you where you're at and respond to the things in the conversations that we're having out there in the world that are going to serve you. All right, make sure you subscribe and we'll see you soon.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.