Art
Siegel

Close Sales Now By Picking The Low-Hanging Fruit

Sales management is a marathon; you win by setting a long-term sales strategy and then implementing all the short-term steps to deliver on your plan. That said, sometimes you must step out of your long-term plan and achieve immediate results. Then it is time to Close Sales Now By Picking The Low-Hanging Fruit.

Imagine that you work in an apple orchard. You and a staff of people reporting to you have been given the task of harvesting all of the apples in the orchard. You have a week to get the job done, which is more than enough time. The only guidelines you have been given are to get all of the good apples, and to do so with a minimum expenditure of man-hours. How would you approach the job?

You would probably spend a few minutes working up an organized plan -- divide your staff into teams, allocate resources such as ladders and bushels, assign each team to a part of the orchard, and so on. Perhaps you would have your most skilled picker demonstrate a few of the most efficient picking techniques.

Suddenly, in the middle of the first day of your organized plan, the owner of the orchard runs out and tells you a severe frost is expected tonight. Any apples that are not picked and taken to the barn by midnight will be lost, so get as many as you can in the next nine hours! Now how would you approach the job?

First, you would call a fast meeting of the picking teams and share the news, so everyone understands why the game plan has changed. Then, you would probably issue an order like this:

Forget the ladders and long-armed pickers. About a third of the apples are within arm's length of the ground. Let's reorganize in teams of three -- two pickers to one bushel man. Starting from here, take one row per team and only pick the lowest-hanging apples, the ones you can reach without the ladder.

Your strategy for beating the frost is simply this: If you need to pick a lot of fruit fast, and you can afford to ignore a lot of perfectly good (but less easy) apples, you pick the lowest-hanging fruit.

In sales management, you normally need to take an orchard view of the situation. Unless you have an unlimited sales territory, every qualified prospective customer is important, and you want to waste as few of them as possible. You plan your resources for maximum revenue at the lowest sales expense. This includes investing some time to get to the more difficult-to-close customers.

Sometimes, though, part or all of your sales team needs to adopt an emergency "low-hanging fruit" plan, particularly when you are behind your plan for the period, and word comes down from the top to pick up the pace -- or else! You do what you must to get some orders now, regardless of the longer-term consequences.

It's important for you to determine which strategy is best at any point in time. Some companies run out of cash or risk losing market share by implementing a sales strategy that takes too long. Others that have high initial orders end up with an excessively high selling cost because they are always in crisis mode. And after picking off the easy customers, they are unprepared to deal with the ones that take more time.

The low-hanging fruit method produces the highest yield for a short period of time, but it isn't sustainable. It costs more per unit of total return, and it wastes a lot of good fruit (or customers). The best sales strategies generally include an overall orchard plan, with an occasional, well-timed low-hanging-fruit blitz.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Art Siegel

About Art Siegel