SME Survey

Following on from the survey on cashflow in the last edition – where the biggest issue was lack of sales, in this edition we delve a little further into what is impacting the sales of small business owners. The options to choose from were:

■ Lack of response to quotes/ emails/etc

■ Current climate (COVID-19)

■ Lack of training

■ Inherent fear!

■ Lead generation - how?

■ Nothing - sales are fine

■ Poor marketing generally

■ Closing the deal

There was an “other” option to capture anything that was missing from the above lists. More than one option could be chosen.

As you can see from figure 1, the biggest contributor is the current climate and 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 that, reassuringly 34.4%

had not experienced an impact on their sales performance. This seems to point to the resilience of small business owners to adapt and respond to whatever is thrown at them! This bodes well for the future when the effect of the pandemic eases and allows businesses to trade normally; or at least has less impact than it is having now.

27.9% indicated that generating leads was an issue in terms of “how to”. This could be a concern as keeping a healthy sales pipeline is key to the success and sustainability of a business. It might be interesting to explore this in a future survey to 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 be useful to drill down on this to establish what the bottle-neck is – could it be the procrastination of the

decision maker, change of their mind, reluctance to say “not interested”, having the wrong value proposition or just the wrong target market?

Closing the deal was the next highest percentage along with poor marketing in general. The former is relatively easily rectified 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!