Your Biggest Bottleneck to Sales

There's always going to be a bottleneck in sales. There's always going to be something that is not working as smoothly or as ideally as it could or should. And our job is to constantly identify, what is it now? What is it today? Now that I got this other thing fixed, what's the new thing that's slowing us down? David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss your biggest bottleneck to sales. Welcome back Kevin. Kevin: Great to see you, David. And this is definitely one that I think anybody can relate to no matter what business you're in, but you're talking about your biggest bottleneck to sales. Let's not bury the lead. What is it? David: In every business there is generally, more than one bottleneck, but there's one big one that is going to keep you from hitting the next bottleneck, or the one after that, or the one after that. And if you don't tackle that first one correctly and get rid of it, then you never get to down the line. It's like an assembly line. If you think about a factory that's manufacturing something and there's an assembly line, if there's a problem at the first station in the assembly line, everything stops, right? Because you can't move to step two until you've done step one. And so for most of us, when it comes to sales, there is a bottleneck. And it might not be at the very beginning. It might be towards the middle, or it might even be near the end. But until you identify what your biggest bottleneck is, you cannot apply the appropriate resources necessary --the time, the energy, and the focus --to blast that thing out of there, so that you can then move forward with everything you need to do. Kevin: All right, so you couldn't just give me the one thing. That's fine. Can you give me some of the more common bottlenecks that you see when it comes to sales? David: Well, sure. When you're in a selling situation, what are the biggest bottlenecks you run into? Well, I'm having trouble reaching the person that I need to reach, right? They're not responding to me. Or some people, toward the end of the sales process, they get right up until the point of closing and then they choke. So that's an example of a bottleneck where if you don't get that one nailed, you can go all the way through a sales process, then get to that point and then not be able to close the sale and everything is kind of wasted. So looking at the steps along the way, what are you going to look at? You're going to look at the people that you're interacting with, the conversations that you're having with them, the timeframe that it takes you to get them from point to point. Because for a lot of people, that is a big one. Not being able to set a pace, set a tempo that allows you to be able to get to that sale sooner rather than later, that could be a big bottleneck for people. A lot of times we have an idea of how we would like the sales process to go. But if the client has a different idea, we're going to have to follow what they're going to be willing to go along with. So in those situations, if we say, alright, I'm going to try to do everything I can here to advance the process to get them to the next step. Maybe it's just a matter of, in the promotional products industry, will they send me the art? They may have agreed to the sale, they may have agreed to the quantities, they may have agreed to the colors and the Pantone color matches and the tight registration. They've agreed to all that. And you can't get them to send the art. That's really frustrating. And it can be a bottleneck that holds up everything. And these bottlenecks that I'm referring to are the things that hold up everything that comes past it. So by simply taking some time to identify what are the biggest bottlenecks, because if you find in your business that it's, "I can't seem to get art from the client," then you need to make sure you put a process in place tha...