Despite rapid market shifts, sales teams at two Austin companies have successfully pivoted and adopted winning strategies.
Recent economic turbulence — marked by high inflation, surging interest rates and high-profile layoffs — has undoubtedly impacted customers and created an uncertain atmosphere for some sales teams. Undeterred, these sales professionals swiftly changed course to best meet their customers’ needs.
By staying on top of industry trends, maintaining open communication with clients, adjusting their marketing language and more, the featured sales leaders have continued to close deals, support customers and, ultimately, set their representatives up for success.
“Being nimble and adaptable to change are our main priorities when avoiding the ups and downs of a changing economy,” said Sam Levine, director of sales at Luxury Presence.
Built In Austin sat down with Levine and Brightpearl’s Senior Director of Sales Joe Barbano to learn more about how they adapted their strategies to rise to the current moment and achieve sales success.
Luxury Presence provides a SaaS marketing system for luxury real estate agents and companies.
What are some ways that your team stays on top of trends and market conditions that impact your customers?
Our customers are agents, teams and brokerages in residential real estate. With interest rates increasing over the past few months, the sales team put an increased emphasis on the importance of getting our clients set up with the right packages to fit their needs.
When things slow down, marketing your business becomes more important than ever because you really need to stand out to win business against your competition. This is a shift from a year ago, when the value of marketing was to take advantage of the fast-moving market.
The market is still as competitive as ever, but the game has shifted, and it’s critical that we set our clients up to win.
The market is still as competitive as ever, but the game has shifted, and it’s critical that we set our clients up to win.”
In light of recent market shifts, what are some ways that your team has adapted its sales strategies?
When the market shifts, the focus shifts to needing to see results quickly. In a sellers’ market, we can really leverage SEO strategies and a longer process to build more organic traffic over time. Barry Cohen Homes, a top luxury realty agency in Toronto, said, “Luxury Presence has been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.” They doubled their monthly users through SEO by more than 10,000 in about a year’s time.
In a buyers’ market, realtors want to see a quick return on investment. For this reason, we recently adapted and added a really exciting new advertising management feature to some of our lower-tiered plans. This gives our clients the opportunity to generate quality leads immediately. Clients can confidently continue to invest in their businesses without having to worry about the immediate results, while offering added time to monitor their expenditures more closely.
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your representatives?
As a salesperson, you are always seeking options and flexibility to meet your clients’ needs and get them onboard. The new strategies that we have put into play have given our representatives exactly that.
Even with the market shifts, by deploying these new strategies and being smart about how we approach every call and prospect, our numbers have continued to move up and to the right, and our representatives have benefited. Being nimble and adaptable to change are our main priorities when avoiding the ups and downs of a changing economy.
Brightpearl offers an operating system for retailers to manage their inventory, warehouses, purchases, shipping and more.
What are some ways that your team stays on top of trends and market conditions that impact your customers?
This is a very topical question and an important one to talk through. Any sales professional who started their career after 2011 probably hasn’t seen market conditions shift this rapidly in their career. My team approaches this topic from two interconnected angles.
First, we stay on top of publications and profiles that resonate with our customers. On my team, this means we follow the biggest players in the retail industry, such as Shopify and Amazon. I actively encourage my team to share news and trends of shifting market conditions that impact our customers. We then discuss these things and what they mean in our team meetings.
The second angle is even more important, and it’s gathered directly from potential customers. The best sales representatives bring discovery conversations out of the challenge-solution weeds and actively talk about bigger-picture items. My team is preparing discovery questions that prompt decision-makers to share their point of view on these market trends.
We want to actively share trends that we see at the aggregate and get opinions from each decision-maker we speak with to find out if the trends are things that we need to act on.
In light of recent market shifts, what are some ways that your team has adapted its sales strategies?
The current economic environment of uncertainty and low consumer confidence likely hit the retail industry before many others. Just in the last year, the industry has gone from high consumer demand coupled with supply chain slowdowns to deflated demand and several companies stuck with piles of overstock. This has changed their posture from growth mode to cash-flow efficiency and optimization mode.
On my team, we’ve aligned our talk tracks at the aggregate away from how our software can help your business grow to how our software can make you more efficient from a cash-flow perspective compared to your competitors. We call this our strategic narrative — and shoutout to Sara Arthrell, our chief marketing officer, for leading this charge.
We now focus first on asking if our decision-makers see the market changes the same way that we do. We get buy-in on the fact that this market change will result in winners and losers, and we align our software’s value propositions to what will make them winners.
We get buy-in on the fact that this market change will result in winners and losers, and we align our software’s value propositions to what will make them winners.”
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your representatives?
We have already started seeing real revenue impacts from our market positioning through the strategic narrative. Certain elements of our software package specifically hit on the optimization of cash flow, and we’ve identified which elements are unique to our solution set in comparison to our competitors.
Since we leaned into this type of positioning, we have won multiple large deals where the decision-maker told us that their company bought our software specifically because we were going to turn their company into a winner amid the volatile market conditions.
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