Go After Sales When You’re Busy; Not When You’re Slow

From 1959 to 1975 I worked as the General Manager of a printed circuit manufacturing company. As in most small companies, I wore several hats, including that of Sales Manager. Those were very busy years undoubtedly caused by the Vietnam War. My Gal Friday was a very nice woman whose husband used to stop by occasionally to pick her up after work. Frequently he and I would chat for a few minutes until it was quitting time. He was the Sales Manager for a well-known chain saw manufacturer and so frequently we talked about sales techniques and procedures.

One afternoon at a time when we were extremely busy, he stopped in and he asked me, "How are sales?" I replied, "We are so busy I can hardly believe it."

Then he asked me, "What are you doing about sales?" I answered, "Doing about sales? We are so busy I can’t imagine how we are going to deliver all the work that we have. The last thing I need right now is more sales."

He answered with some wisdom that I have never forgotten. He said, "Wrong! This is when you need to go out and call on all your customers and their purchasing agents. They need you now and every door will be open to you. When things are slow, they will be inundated with salespeople and they won’t need you then. If you call on them now when they need you, they will remember you when things are slow and they will give you what little work they have then."

That piece of wisdom has worked for me ever since. But how do you handle more business when you already have more than you can handle? There are several ways to look at this "problem." (By the way, having too much business is what I call "good problems.")

First of all, always remember that you are selling the capacity to do work or to produce goods. Another way to say this is to say that you are selling your time, your expertise and your manufacturing capability. By the law of supply and demand, when supply becomes scarce, prices go up. To put it bluntly, this is the time to raise your prices because the supply of capacity is scarcer.

OK, you raise your prices and business still continues to come in. Now is the time to consider working your people overtime even if you need to pay premium wages. Or start a second or even a third shift so that you are using your facilities and equipment on a round-the-clock basis. Depending on your supervisory situation, this will probably mean that you will be putting in a lot more hours. (I didn’t say it would be easy.)

Another approach could be to "farm out" some work to some of your competitors. Of course sending work to competitors will risk having them try to steal some of your customers. But if you are careful about disguising who your customers are, you can make it difficult for that to happen. The other concern is that your competitors might charge you so much for doing the work that you make little or no profit on the job. But even if you make no profit on these "busy times" jobs, it will pay off in the future when things get slow. To repeat myself, your purchasing contacts will remember who it was that helped them during those busy times.

The moral of the story? Go after new business when you’re busy and then do whatever it takes to "deliver the goods." It will pay off when the slow times come.

© 2008 by Paul Burri
#102 for the week of May 19, 2008