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Make Your Small Business a Winner: Sales cycles: feast or famine!

by Anna Hipkiss

If you’ve experienced feast and famine, you will know that a feast is more like a treadmill, whereas famine is more like famine! This phrase is applied most often to service organisations, but it can happen to any business.

At feast time you are rushed off your feet, thinking only about delivery. You will have no time for building your pipeline and finding your next new customers.

When famine hits you may just have emerged from a busy period, with no prospect of an order in sight. It will be hard to cope without the pressure you’ve been used to. You may lose momentum, or worse, motivation.

The secret, of course, is never to stop growing your business; never to stop looking for the next opportunity, no matter how busy you are now. Either that, or plan positively for a period where you will survive on the proceeds of the feast, and not expect to earn much, instead putting a huge effort into marketing and sales. If you take this route, do it in the knowledge of how long it takes you to win business. For example if, as a consultant, you average 9 months before you close a big project, then with no pipeline, you might have to plan for a year of famine – can you cope with that, both personally and financially?


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