“DON’T CONFUSE SALES ACTIVITY - OR UNSUPPORTED OPTIMISM - WITH TANGIBLE EVIDENCE OF THE BUYER’S TRUE BEHAVIOUR.”
Then you should systematically review every deal in your pipeline against the objective criteria you have established. Don’t confuse sales activity - or unsupported optimism - with tangible evidence of the buyer’s true behaviour. Concentrate instead on working out where each prospect really is in their buying decision process, and for observable evidence that they see you as their preferred option. Ensure that each opportunity is accurately placed in the sales pipeline.
Almost inevitably, deals will move backwards or fall out of the pipeline altogether. The apparent value of your pipeline may shrink dramatically. But the loss of value is an illusion, because those opportunities were never going to close when the sales person hoped. Better to find out now, and deal with the consequences, than find out later when it’s too late to deal with the hole in your forecast. Going forwards, you need to continue managing your pipeline on a “no room for speculation” basis.
Are You Realising the Potential of Your Investment in CRM? My last suggestion? Make the most of your CRM. Most sales organisations have invested in some form of CRM system. Few have managed to come anywhere close to realising
its potential for improving their sales performance. Worse, many have ended up with an implementation that sales people grudgingly regard as a management-imposed administration system rather than a true sales enablement tool.
The first key to getting the most out of your CRM system is for your sales people to see it as something that helps them win more business. Don’t ask them to enter superfluous information they know will never be looked at again. Focus instead on collecting the sort of data about deals that will enable you as a manager to coach and support them more effectively. Explain that you are looking for patterns of successful behaviour that can help all sales people become more effective - and deliver on that promise through your actions.
Make sure you’re using CRM data intelligently. Make sure that your reports show you sales velocity - the length of time each opportunity takes to pass through each stage - so that you can identify both the stuck and the fast-moving opportunities. If you use percentage probabilities for each stage, do some analysis and make sure that the percentages you use reflect actual recent performance. Look for trends and act upon them.
In Conclusion Most functions in any organisation - sales included - benefit from getting back to the fundamentals on a regular basis. I hope that my suggestions help you to identify and eliminate some of the wasted effort that may be currently going on inside your own sales organisation, and that they enable you to reassign your resources in a way that directly impacts your revenue numbers. Good selling!
43 entrepreneurcountry
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