But not all issues are created equal. There are a number of issues that might cause a prospect to want to speak to you. But you need to carefully distinguish between interesting issues that might spark an enquiry, important issues that might result in serious consideration, and those business critical issues that they cannot afford not to deal with.


That’s not to say that the other types of issue aren’t relevant to the sales conversation - but you need to find ways to either elevate interesting or important issues to business critical ones, or to take the opportunity out of the forecast and continuing nurturing it until the problem reaches a level where they are prepared to spend money on addressing it.


What Does an Ideal Prospect Look Like? If your sales people are to invest their prospecting energies effectively, they need to have a clear picture of what an ideal prospect looks like - and the same is true of your marketers. You have to see beyond the traditional demographic characteristics like size, industry and geography and look for the environmental, situational and behavioural qualities that separate great prospects from poor ones. Your top performing sales people probably understand this instinctively, but many sales people end up wasting an awful amount of time chasing prospects who are unlikely to buy (or, if they do buy, are unlikely to buy from you). Get your sales people together. Ask them to think “outside of the box” about the common characteristics of their best customers, as well as the predictable reasons they lose deals.


Use the inputs to define the common characteristics of the organisations you are most likely to be successful selling to. Get your marketing people to target their campaigns on the organisations and problems you are best placed to deal with. And get your sales people to probe for these characteristics when they qualify their sales opportunities.


Have You Implemented a Consistent Sales Process? Putting your sales people on a sales training programme doesn’t guarantee that they will sell in a consistently successful way. In fact it doesn’t even guarantee that they will implement any of the techniques they have been expensively trained on. The most consistently successful sales organisations are the ones with a thoughtfully defined sales process that is based both on the winning habits of their top sales performers and on more widely- recognised best practice.


If you haven’t got a defined sales process - or if you have one that you sense is being inconsistently applied - now is the time to establish one. Review your most successful recent sales campaigns and look for the common characteristics. What key stages and milestones did the prospect appear to go through? What actions did your successful sales people take? How can you embed that learning into your sales process.


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