Slumps Equal Exploration

(0:00 – 0:55)
Sales, what happens when sales are not only down, you’re in a physical slump and I’m going to hit this from a couple of different angles. And the first one’s kind of obvious, but if you look at a professional baseball player, they make it to the hall of fame when they hit 300. That means three out of every 10 times they come up to the plate, they safely reach first base.

Seven out of 10, they either strike out, ground out, pop out. But basically they fail seven out of 10 times. And again, they get into the hall of fame.

If three out of 10 times they hit the ball, basically. And so a slump to a baseball player, a lot of times is simply the statistical chance. Since you have a 70% chance of making an out, it’s the statistical chance of a lot of those outs stacking up.

(0:55 – 1:19)
And then of course, when they grind through and then they start hitting the ball, it’s not ironic. It’s not an accident that they get into the opposite of a slump woods, which they get into a hot streak. And it’s the same thing as if you’re playing roulette and you got a 30% chance of say, I don’t know, the first third of the board, one through 12, you got about a one third chance of that.

(1:19 – 1:42)
There’s 36 numbers plus one or two green, green ones. So, so conceptually we got to look at business the same way. So if you’re slumping before you were in a slump, what were your numbers? Were you closing one out of 10 that hits your website? One out of 10, presentations you did live a one out of three, one out of two.

(1:42 – 1:49)
What were your numbers? And the first thing you have to understand is business. It still involves numbers. You’re a human being.

(1:49 – 2:39)
You have a ratio of success in it. Unless your closing ratio is better than 50%, the statistical chances say you’re going to get a slump. However, I’ve been slumping for 24 years and I think I’ve gotten through without exaggerating 20 to 30 slumps, some of them incredibly severe.

Uh, and, and I think I can speak to slumping sales pretty good. So, uh, I’m going to hit this from a couple of different angles, uh, of, of how to, how to do what types of marketing in what situation. So first things first to start with, often I have found the best things happen to my company during a slump.

(2:39 – 3:13)
I think a lot of people have come to me over the years and said, you know what? I cannot believe I’m about to say this, but had we not been in that slump, we would have not started doing radio or we would have not partnered with that JV guy. Uh, we would have not that, that, that, that, that. And so the concept is necessity often is the mother of all invention.

I’m going to get to that in a minute. But the first thing that a slump does, and it does two things for sure. Number one, it exposes gaps in your business model.