The Business Bulletin
SME Survey What factors are hampering your sales?
As you can see from figure 1, the biggest
reluctance to say “not interested”,
contributor is the
having the wrong value proposition or
current climate and
just the wrong target market?
the pandemic affecting the sales of 39.3% of the 61 respondents. This makes sense as pretty much every business has in some way been impacted by the lockdowns that the UK has been facing. Having said Figure 1
that, reassuringly 34.4% had not experienced
Following on from the survey on
an impact on their sales performance.
cashflow in the last edition – where
This seems to point to the resilience
the biggest issue was lack of sales, in
of small business owners to adapt
this edition we delve a little further
and respond to whatever is thrown at
into what is impacting the sales of
them! This bodes well for the future
small business owners. The options
when the effect of the pandemic
to choose from were:
eases and allows businesses to trade
■ Lack of response to quotes/ emails/etc ■ Current climate (COVID-19) ■ Lack of training
to”. This could be a concern as keeping a healthy sales pipeline is of a business. It might be interesting understand what the key barriers are. Frustratingly 16.4% cited lack of response as a factor in their sales. There is probably nothing worse than having to chase quotes down to close that deal. Once again it might
capture anything that was missing
be useful to drill down on this to
from the above lists. More than one
establish what the bottle-neck is –
option could be chosen.
could it be the procrastination of the
42 | Issue 6 – Sales and Marketing
by undertaking some sales training to better understand the various methods of getting that elusive sale. It is no surprise that poor marketing came up in the survey. Most small businesses are not that great at marketing in an effective way. This is often down to “having a punt” at various marketing activities but not effectively measuring which ones deliver the best returns. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!
27.9% indicated that generating
to explore this in a future survey to
There was an “other” option to
former is relatively easily rectified
leads was an issue in terms of “how
■ Lead generation - how?
■ Closing the deal
poor marketing in general. The
than it is having now.
key to the success and sustainability
■ Poor marketing generally
Closing the deal was the next highest percentage along with
normally; or at least has less impact
■ Inherent fear!
■ Nothing - sales are fine
decision maker, change of their mind,
Get involved To take part in the next survey – it takes a look at how well small businesses have their ducks in a row when it comes to HR, health and safety and other procedural aspects to their business – visit here: https://forms.gle/ KRmDYtgq3WfPnRaEA. The results will be shared in the next edition of this magazine.
