A sales leader describes walking New York hotels during a recession, handing out cards to fill meetings, and targeting just 1-2% market share. The point: a down market is still a market. Stop making excuses and hustle.
One thing that was unique to the recession, I remember early on having conversations with our sales team, and I was like, why are our spaces not filled? And they said, well, you know, the market's down 30%. And my answer to that was, well, we're not trying to take 100% market share. I'm trying to take 1 or 2% market share of a, of either in New York, what was a multi-billion-dollar business. And I just walked through all these hotels in New York and I saw them having meetings. I don't need every single meeting in New York, but if we just could get 1 or 2% of those meetings. So I would literally go and walk around the hotels and speak to people who were the conference organizers who would be at the table. And I would just walk through the hotel and I would give them my business card and I would tell, I would basically just cut and paste that revenue into my locations, whatever it took, I would do. But, you know, there's a lot of people are, are going to make excuses and they're going to harp on the fact that, well, the market's down 20% or 30% or 50%. I don't care. All I want is 1% of that market. And I want the types of salespeople who are going to go and hustle and fill my space. I'm not trying to cure the entire economy. I'm just trying to, you know, I'm just trying to maximize the capacity of my particular business.
A down market is still a market.
Absolutely.
There's still— things are still being bought and sold. It's just shifted from here to here. And yeah, especially with entrepreneurs, like, they don't have anything invested in over here, right? Big companies have built all— they built floors, buildings, infrastructures, processes to function over here, and now it's moved over here. So that's, that's where entrepreneurs need to go.
