Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager.  Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically.  I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits.  It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management.

The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly.  Let’s start with the areas in which we are in real alignment.

The biggest impact a sales manager at any level can have is by being out with their people in front of customers.  Yet too often, exactly the opposite thing happens–managers spend too much of their time internally focused.  They are chained to their desks, conducting internal meetings, conducting internal reviews, spending time reporting on what’s going on.  Some of this is necessary-we need to communicate to the rest of the organization, we need to get resources and support for our people, we need to get help for our customers.  But too often, managers are consumed with this.  They stop visiting customers, they stop visiting their people.

Being chained to the desk, being focused on reporting, staying internally focused on internal politics do not produce revenue or improve the capabilities of sales people.

Without a doubt, the number 1 and the number 1 priorities of sales managers are Customers and Your People!  If the majority of your time isn’t spent in the field working with your people and visiting your customers, you are prioritizing things incorrectly.  Nothing trumps spending your time here–period.  A number of years ago, I was EVP of Sales for a large organization.   I was scheduled to do a presentation at our Board of Directors.  It was an “important” presentation.  As the day approached, a critical customer situation arose.  It was clear that my involvement was needed and, unfortunately, the only time available with the customer conflicted with my ability to present to the Board.  The decision was easy for me–I conveyed my apologies to my boss, the CEO, and to the Board Members, saying Customers and this situation were more important.  Fortunately, my boss and the board applauded that decision–and we did get the order.

So managers need to prioritize time with customers and with their people.  We need to unchain ourselves from our desks and spend the majority of our time in the field.  Take a moment right now and look at your calendar for the past 30 days.  If you haven’t spent a minimum of 50 percent of your time in the field with your people and with customers, you’re not maximizing your impact.

Now once we’ve committed to spend our time in the field, where do we have the most impact?  This is where I think the article is dead wrong.  It suggests that managers spend the bulk of their time with A players and calling on their customers.  I don’t want to ignore the A players, but this is not where the problems are, this is not where managers have the most impact—both in driving performance of sales people and in contributing to closing business.  By definition, the A players really don’t need your help, so it’s irresponsible to focus the bulk of our time with them, unless all you want is “feel good” meetings.

Where we as managers have the greatest impact and leverage is with our B and even C players.  Maximizing the performance of that huge middle range of our people—the B players has the highest return on a manager’s time.  Working with them, we have so much more impact, so much greater room for helping them improve.  Likewise, the impact we have working with them, on their deals, helping strengthen their competitive positioning and moving the deal through the customer’s buying cycle.  (For a different perspective the value of focusing on your B players, look at what the authors of Challenger Selling have to say.)

It may be more fun hanging out with A players and their customers, but that’s not our job as sales managers.  Our job is to maximize the performance of our organization.  We have to invest our time where it has greatest impact, and frankly where we’re needed.  By  definition, it won’t be with our top performers.

This doesn’t say we ignore our C players either.  Our job is to maximize performance, this includes dealing with performance problems.  Coaching our C players–either getting them to be B’s or A’s, moving them into roles where they can be B’s or A’s (and that may be out of the company) is our responsibility as managers.

Whatever level of manager you are, spend your time where you have the greatest impact–it’s always with customers and sales people.  Once you get out to the field, don’t hide out–head straight for the people and customers where you can bring the greatest value and impact, and where you are most needed.  Don’t ignore your A players or your great customers, but they don’t really need you as much.  It’s your B and C players that need you and your attention.  It’s the tough customers where you can help both your people and the customers the most.

Serve your people, serve your customers, the rest takes care of itself.

Related posts:

1. Sales Is Changing, Are You Maximizing Your Impact?
2. Performance Management And Accountability
3. Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment

One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism.  It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person.  After all, we face rejection every day.  We face challenges and obstacles in every situation.  Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges.  Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.

It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.

But sometimes that optimism hurts us.  Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be.  This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face.  It’s one of our own creation.  And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in.  All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.

It happens all sorts of ways.  Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want.  Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline.  We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened.  All of a sudden our win rates go down.  This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.

Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go.  We’ve invested a lot of time and resource.  We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere.  We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever.  The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.

Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call.  But we aren’t making progress.  We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.

Facing reality is critical to our success.  If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk.  If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable  And busyness masks everything.  We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.

Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Facing reality is important.  Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance.  It helps us identify and solve our problems.  It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.

It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand.  But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.

If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening.  Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be?  Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.

Related posts:

1. What Are The Biggest Challenges Facing Sales VP’s In This Economy
2. No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!
3. Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed To Sell?

Sales people are notoriously bad at writing things down and documenting things.  I talk to thousands a year.  When I start talking about documenting something–a deal plan, an account plan, territory, call plans, even a to-do list–all of a sudden you can see the resistance in their faces. 

They sit back, fold their arms.  Most say nothing, but a few courageous one’s will say, “Dave, you don’t get it.  I’m  too busy to do this.  I don’t have time to document these things–it’s too bureaucratic–I’ve got a plan, it’s in my head!”

I’m used to this.  I respond, “OK, I get it, let’s talk about your plan for this opportunity………”  It’s always the same, they start talking, they tell me about the deal, they tell me about what they’ve done.  I start asking questions, “Where are you in the sales process, how do you know you are aligned with the customer buying process, what are the risks to the customers in this project, what is your positioning vis a vis the competitors, ….. the list goes on.”  I get more data, but as we proceed, it gets sketchier and sketchier. 

We then talk about “What are the next things you need to do, who do you need to do it with, when are you going to do it?  What’s the positioning you need to win this deal?”   They respond, they outline action plans and strategies, I take notes, writing down the next steps.  Ususally they don’t.  They say, they’re under control, they can do the deal, they don’t need to document the plan.  I smile and thank them.

At the first milestone, I call or email, “How did it go?”  You know what happens–the majority of the time, the response comes back, “I forgot to do it, I’ll get right on it.”  The second milestone, “How did it go?”  You know…..

We sit down, I pull out my notes from the last meeting and ask “We developed these strategies to position ourselves to win.  We committed to these steps and actions to execute the strategies.  Where are we in executing the plan?”  The discussion usually involves a lot of hand waving, some apologies, a re-commitment to execute the strategy, then a quick escape.  This time they write a few things down, but too often, they’re forgotten.

Sales people are right, they are busy, they’ve got a lot of things to do, different deals, different accounts, different sales callse.  Changing customer requirements, shifts in our strategies.  It’s impossible to keep it in your head.  You lose most of it–you may remember one or two things, you may have jotted down a couple of reminders, but most of the time we’re busy with activities, responding customer requests, reacting to what may have happened in the last call.  We drift further and further away from our plans and strategies.  Sales cycles get lengthened, deals go away.

It is impossible to keep it all in our heads!  We need to document our plans, we need to use the plans to guide our actions, keeping us focused, on target, moving forward purposefully in the execution of our strategies.  We need to document our plans–they provide the basis for what we do every day.  They provide the foundation of taking our daily activities and transforming them into accomplishments.

Being too busy to  document your plans–whether it’s a deal plan, prospecting, call, territory, account or other plan–is just an excuse.  It’s an excuse for being less productive, it’s an excuse for winning less, it’s an excuse for not being accountable.

Writing it down, keeps us focused, having it documented, means we don’t have to remember and we never forget.  Many of us work with teams–a documented plan keeps the team focused, well coordinated and moving forward.

• Do you take the time to maximize your productivity, impact and effectiveness?
• Are you documenting and updating all your deal/opportunity plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your prospecting plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your account and territory plans?
• Are you prioritizing all of these in your day to day activities?

Related posts:

1. Not Worth The “Paper It’s Written” On
2. Reacting!
3. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share

It’s the end of the year.  The New Year often represent a time for a fresh start.  We have new goals and quotas.  New initiatives and priorities will be launched in each of the thousands of Kickoff meetings that occur around the world.  We may have committed to some New Year’s resolutions.

Yet, it’s really only a New Year from the point of view of the calendar.  We each come into the New Year with a lot of baggage.  Deals in process, all the things that were on our to-do lists that haven’t gotten to done.  With the New Year, a fresh start that is really not a fresh start, and a lot of new initiatives, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just fall back into old habits.  Or it’s easy to be cynical and just keep doing the same old stuff.

I believe there’s merit to reflecting on the past year and looking at what worked and what didn’t work.  I think it’s important to enter the new year shedding as much baggage as possible.  Use this as the opportunity to clear some “space,”  on your calendar, in your day to day routine, in your mind.

Pull out a sheet of paper, draw a line, vertically, down the middle.  On the left side, title the column:  “What Worked,”  the right, “What Didn’t.”  Don’t focus on the broad strategic issues, look at the little things, the details.  Things like, “I kept putting off updating CRM and doing reports,”  “I didn’t spend enough time prospecting.” 

Set a goal for yourself–identify 25 things that worked and 25 things that didn’t work.  Write them down, don’t stop until you get 25—they may be ridiculously trivial, but make sure you write down 25.

For the time being, focused on the things that Didn’t Work.  Prioritize the 25.  Rank them so the biggest problem, the thing that had the biggest negative impact is first, the next is second, and so on.  For the top 3—no more—write down what you are going to do to eliminate or fix them.  Treat them as projects–develop an action plan, milestones and target dates. 

For the remaining 22 items, look at the things that you can outright stop doing.  Usually it’s at least the last few, it could be more.  Look at the things that you were doing that were a waste of time, effort, or just didn’t work.  Draw a line through them and just stop doing them.  Be as aggressive as possible.  The more you can eliminate, them more you will free time up to focus on what works.  Some of this may require you to sit down with your manager to discuss what you are stopping and why.  You may need to negotiate some agreement, or your manager may need to take on the task to coach and train you on things you will not be permitted to stop doing.  Get your manager to put some skin into this and supporting you.   

Keep the list in front of you for the next few months to remind yourself, so you don’t fall into bad habits.

Look at the things that Did Work.  Again, prioritize them, ranking the thing that had the highest positive impact on your success first, the next second, through the entire 25 items.  This time, look at the bottom 5 on that list.  Could you stop doing them–even though they worked–without having a significant impact on your success?  If you can, eliminate them.  Then look at the top 3 things.  Ask yourself the question, “How can I spend more time doing these things?”  Develop an action plan with milestones and target dates.  Ignore everything else.

Try this over the weekend.  Be thoughtful about it.  Make sure you write it down, then post the results at your desk–just above your phone.  Let the list constatnly remind you so you can build good habits in the next couple of months.

Enter the New Year with as little unnecessary baggage as possible.  Free your time to focus on the things that really impact you.  Stop or ignore all the rest.

Best wishes for a healthy and productive New Year!  Thank you for following this blog and your active participation in the discussions here, on LinkedIn an other forums where this appears.  I deeply appreciate your engagement.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Churn

Time Management is a top issue impacting sales productivity.  It’s tough to establish measures on  time management.  Some people keep an inventory of what they’ve gotten done, for example to-do’s completed.  One of the things I like tracking–not on an ongoing basis, but from time to time is:  Time Available For Selling.

There are lots of ways to look at this.  It’s important to establish your own definition and maintain consistency  in how you track it.  Many tend to define it in the following way:  Time actually spend meeting with customers and prospects (whether in person or on the phone/web conference), plus time spent in preparing for the meeting and in direct follow up.

Most of the market survey’s on “Time Available For Selling”  is reasonably in the same range, 37-45%!  This means 63-55% of our time is spent in non sales activities!  Surprised?  We’ve done some assessments where we have seen time available for selling as low as 18-30%.

It’s kind of amazing,  our jobs are to be working with customers, yet the marjority of our time is spent in other activities.  A lot of those are important activities.  Training meetings, some time spent in customer service/non selling activities, some necessary administraioon , travel, and other things.  These are all part of our jobs and part of what we need to do to be sales people.

Time Drains: 

However, when you start monitoring how you spend your time, it’s important to look at “time drains.”  These are things that detract from your time available for selling.  As we’ve helped organizations assess this, we find some stark contrasts between sales people in large organizations and sales people in small organizations.

In large organizations, there are lots of distractions to selling activities.  There tend to be lots of internal meetings–they may be well intended, but they are drains on people’s time.  For example, in one Fortune 25 organization we worked with, we found marketing, product managers, customer service and all sorts of people interested in “understanding what the customers thought, what was happening in the field,” and other things.  These were well intended people, doing their jobs, but when we looked at the collective impact of hundreds of these people vying for sales people’s time, the impact was great.  In this same organization, there were continual new programs and initiatives.  Again, each product manager was anxious for their initiatives to be successful, they spent time with sales people, getting mindshare, training.  Each effort, alone, was a small impact, but when you looked at all the things going on across the entire organization the impact was enormous.

Many of these things are important.  However, it’s important to look at the overall impact of each of these little time drains.  In the case I cited above, everyone–sales, marketing, product managers were simply unaware of the impact of these time drains.  Once they became aware of them, we were able to look at doing things differently.  In the case of this organization, we were able to free up 20% of the time–without changing anything about how the people sold, we were able to almost double time available for selling, consequently double productivity.

Every large organization has these time drains.  We become unconscious to them, and over time they grow.  Assessing the time drains periodically can give tremendous improvements in Time Available for selling.

In small organizations, it’s a little more difficult.  The reason is, often sales people wear multiple hats.  In addition to selling, they  may be doing some marketing programs, customer service or support.  It’s simply because the organization is small and cannot afford to put the resources in place for each function.  The time drains are very obvious, but the fixes are more difficult.  Sometimes when they get to be big enough, you find you can justify hiring a person to do the function, freeing up the sales person to sell.  Sometimes, sales people use these other duties as an escape or an excuse.  If you know you have to do a lot or prospecting and you want to find excuses for not doing it, you can always use your other responsibilities as a mechanism for avoiding it.  It happens to all of us.  For example, I reserve time once a week to process bills and send them to our accountant for handling.  Usually I do this on Saturday mornings.  Today, I had a large block of time that I needed to do prospecting — I’ve told you how much I hate it. I almost decided to do my bill processing–I could have easily rationalized it–fortunately I didn’t.

In organizatons, large and small, we can always find excuses not to sell.  There are always “important meetings” to go to, reports to complete, research to be done.  Too often, sometimes unconsciously, we create the time drain.  This is the worst possible time drain–something top sales professionals minimize.

Leveraging Time Available For Selling:

If we accept the market surveys, the average sales person only has 405 of their time available for selling—that’s less than half our time!  Think about it, we have quotas that require our full time effort to achieve, but we have less than half our time to achieve them!

We need to make sure that whatever time we have available to sell, we use as effectively as possible.  This is where planning comes in–investing the time to develop a strong deal strategy–focusing on how you increase your odds of winning and reduce the sales cycle is critical.  Making each sales call count—figuring how you might compress what you would normally accomplish in 2-3 calls, compressing it to 1 call.  Planning, preparation, then effective execution are critical to making the most of the time you do have available to sell.

Final Thoughts:

It’s hard to monitor Time Available For Selling and the Time Drains.  Once a quarter, I take a week and closely watch my time.  At the end of the day, a look at how I’ve spent the day.  After collecting data for a week, I look at how I’m spending my time.  Are there time drains I can identify and eliminate?  I look at the time I have spent selling, have I used that time to maximum impact?

In sales we can recover virtually everything.  The only thing that we lose permanently is our time–it’s critical that we make each moment of the day as impactful as possible.

We’ve done lots of work in this.  If you need help in looking at how you are spending your time, give me a call!

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Churn
3. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures

The other day, someone called me.  He wanted to pick my brain (feeble pickings) for some ideas and ask for some help.  I was delighted with the call, both because he’s a prospect, and it was ego gratifying to be asked for the advice.  But the call ended up being a waste of time–mine and the prospect’s.

See, the problem was the multitasking being done by the prospect.  He was in a car–fortunately not driving, other people were in the car, having a different conversation, which my prospect would interrupt our conversation, to inject a comment into the other conversation.  There were also long pauses (and some background clicking), as I could hear him texting or emailing during our conversation.

I had to repeat myself several times, I could tell he wasn’t getting it, he clearly was distracted.  I suggested we speak later in the day, when he was in his office and could focus.  If this were an isolated incident with this individual, it may be excusable.  But it was his modus operandi–and it was the central issue to his effectiveness as a leader in the organization.  His people would tell me, “he isn’t listening, he’s always multitasking,”  “it takes 3-4 times of explaining the sale thing, until he understands.”  “he wastes my time.”  There was clearly a performance and morale problem in his organization–and his behavior was at the core of the problem.

Whenever I tried to confront it with him, he’d listen with one ear, looking at something on his computer screen, while simultaneously, texting,  and every once in a while injecting an “uh-huh,” or “what was that again?”

That afternoon, I called the executive up, it was to follow up on our conversation earlier in the day.  He said he was really glad I called, the issue was important, his boss was breathing down his neck.  As I started to speak, I started hearing the key board, hearing the distracted responses.  I stopped the conversation and hung up.

Moments later, my phone rang, it was the executive, “We must have been disconnected, what were you saying?”  I responded, “No we weren’t disconnected, I hung up.  Clearly, you aren’t ready to have this conversation.”

There was a moment of silence, “What do you mean, I need to get this done!” was the angry response.  I replied, “This apparently isn’t important enough for you to focus on it, so I’ll wait until you are ready to be present in our discussion.  Until then, we are wasting each other’s time.  Would you call me when you are ready to put everything aside and pay attention solely to our conversation?”  I then said good bye and hung up.

About 15 minutes later, my phone rang again.  It was the executive.  “I was so angry, I had to take a few minutes to calm down.  What do you mean?”  I explained to him what was going on, I walked him through some of the meetings I had participated in recently, how little had been accomplished, how upset his people were. We had a long conversation — the good news was he wasn’t multitasking, he was totally focused on the conversation.  For the moment, he’s making a strong effort not to multitask–you can see small improvements in attitudes with his people already.  They see him listening, they know he is paying attention.

We see it everyday, sometimes I fall victim myself.  This morning, I had breakfast with some colleagues.  It started with each of us conversing while tweeting, reading texts, looking at emails, distracted by people wandering the hotel lobby—we decided to put away our devices and pay attention to our conversation.

I did notice the tables around us.  Filled with business professionals, all intent in their conversations,  but most distracted by the iPhones and Blackberry’s.  I wondered what was happening.

There are all sorts of studies talking about how bad multitasking is.  Most studies reach the conclusion that people are less productive multitasking, than if they focused on one thing, completed it, moved on to the next.

I’m convinced, too many multitask only as a narcissistic show, “look at how busy I am,”  “look at me, I have to do a lot of things at once.”  It’s funny, I meet with a number of very senior and truly exceptional leaders.  Each of them is confident, each of them is totally present.  When we meet, it’s us speaking with each other, paying attention, engaging, and being present.

Multi-tasking is the ultimate demonstration of your lack of respect—for those who you are not paying attention to, and to yourself.

Do you respect yourself and your time enough to be present in what you are doing?

Do you respect those you are working with enough to be present and engaged in the conversation, not letting anything else distract you?

No related posts.

It’s always difficult to balance our selling activities.  We’ve got a bunch of hot deals going, we drop everything else, focusing on those deals.  There’s the new product launch, we spend all out time visiting customer on the new product.  There’s the problem customer, we jump in trying to solve the problem and make them happy.

The life of any sales person is one of constant juggling, re-prioritization.  We have lots of things going, lots of things diverting our attention, we have to continue to shift where we spend our time.

The thing that usually suffers during these times is prospecting.  Most of us don’t like doing it, we prefer working on deals or doing almost anything other than prospecting and looking for new opportunities.  We don’t like picking up the phone and calling someone we’ve not met.  We don’t like the rejection.  Too often, we look for excuses to avoid prospecting, nothing’s better than working a deal that’s nearing a close.

The problem is prospecting isn’t something you can start and stop.  We always have to devote time, every week to focus on the top of the funnel.  Leads go cold–all that’s been invested in developing and nurturing a lead can be wasted if we don’t contact the prospect on a timely basis.

Leads have their own life and their own time cycle.  A lead doesn’t care if we are busy on a proposal.  A lead doesn’t care that we are in a week of training meetings.  A lead is there for a period of time, then it goes away, perhaps to a competitor that happened to be prospecting.

Things start slowing down, we’ve closed all the deals in our pipeline, there’s not enough left, all of a sudden those leads are the most important thing to us, and we don’t have enough, so we start dialing blindly.  We start chasing after anything because we’re desperate.  The quality of our pipeline goes down, but we’ve we’ve got a few deals, so we stop our prospecting, focusing on those deals.

Prospecting is not a start and stop activity.  Even when we have a good funnel, we need to prospect.  If things are flowing through the funnel effectively, then we will need new deals to replace those we’ve closed.  Great sales people balance their time–they work on current deals, the support their customers, they invest in prospecting, knowing they always need to find new deals.

• Are you balancing your time between current deals, prospecting, and other activities?
• Do you know the number of prospects you have to speak with every week to develop a balanced pipeline?
• Are you avoiding the starting and stopping, making the most of each lead that you have?

Related posts:

1. You’ve Got New Ideas, New Programs, But What Are You Stopping?
2. Sales Manager Or Individual Contributor?
3. When Do You Stop Qualifying?

In past posts, I’ve talked a lot about metrics within the traditional Sales Pipeline/Funnel, focusing on qualified opportunities.  Today, too many of the sales people I speak to are “opportunity starved.”  They don’t have a sufficient volume of opportunities to achieve their goal.  One of the most important things sales people must do is focus on prospecting—finding and qualifying new opportunities.

One of the most important prospecting metrics is the % of Leads Converted To Opportunities— (Leads Qualified And Converted To Opportunities)/(Total Leads Prospected).  For many people this is a frightening number–I’ve seen some people needing to prospect up to 100 prospects to find 0ne opportunity!  Clearly, this is a problem—we need to find ways of shifting that number into our favor.

So how do we do this? 

First, we need to start tracking the number–however bad it may be.  Then we need to drill down and understand what is driving that number?

• Are we calling the right organizations?
• Are we calling the right people within those organizations?
• Are we finding them at a time when they have a need to buy?
• Do we have a compelling message they want to hear?
• Are we creating value in those initial calls? (Recognize, we may go through several calls to convert a lead to a qualified opportunity)

Analyze what you’ve done, look at what works and what doesn’t work.  What you need to do is to see if you can shift the numbers to your favor.  For example if  you have to contact 10 prospects to generate 1 qualified opportunity (a 10% lead to conversion ratio), how can you move that to a 20% conversion ratio—this doubles the number of qualified leads you get from those 10 prospecting calls. 

Understanding your sweet spot is critical–focusing on prospects within the sweet spot produces far bettter results.  Yet, during tough times, sales people tend to do just the opposite–they relax their definition of the sweet spot, just trying to find something or someone who is willing to talk.  While you may be having more conversations, the quality of those conversations goes down.  If anything, in tough times, you should tighten your prospecting criteria, doing a far better job of targeting.

Are we contacting them at the right time?  If you are focused on your sweet spot, 100 percent of them will have a need to buy at some time.  They just may not have that need today or tomorrow.  It may be next year, the year after, or later.  It’s important that we intersect them at the right time–it’s also important that we nurture them, so that we can intersect them when they have a need to buy, even if that’s several years out.

Many of the marketing automation tools are very powerful in helping do this.   They help you and your organization better assess the likelihood that specific customers have an iminient need.  They also help in maintaining meaningful contact with the customer, nurturing and informing them, building the relationship until they have a need to buy.  They are very powerful, if your organization has them, embrace them and leverage them to your advantage.  If your organization doesn’t have these tools, figure out how to do something similar yourself.  How do you keep in contact with prospects that don’t have a need to buy today, but will next year.  Do you call them every once in a while, do you send them newsletters or emails with information they may be interested in.  Figure out a way to identify when the time is right and how to nurture a prospect until the time is right.

If you are calling in your sweet spot at the right time, how do you continue to shift the numbers to your favor?  Are you calling the right person, are you maximizing your impact on each call.  Before you pick up the phone and make a call, or before you inflict your “standard script” on the person, do your homework.  Do some research so that you can maximize the impact on the person—can you find their profile in LinkedIn?  Does that give you insight into who they are and how you might more effectively connect?  What’s happening with their company–look at their web site, look at their press releases.  Are there things happening with the company that can help shape your conversation with the person?  What’s happening in their industry, with their customers, and competition?  If you are focusing on your sweet spot, you probably already know this.

No call should be “cold,” even if it’s your very first interaction with the prospect.  Doing your homework, doing some nominal level of research will start improving your ability to connect in a meaningful way on that first call. 

If you aren’t tracking your % of Leads Converted To Opportunities, you don’t know where to start in shifting the numbers in your favor.  You are just guessing, and you are wasting your time.  Track these numbers, then analyze them, look for ways to improve, shifting the numbers in your favor.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — % Of Opportunities Advanced
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Balance
3. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures

Do you have a plan?

Do you have a plan for winning this deal?

1. Do you know the key activities you must execute to win the deal?
2. Do these activities align with the customer’s buying process?
3. Do these activities align with your selling process?
4. Do these activities align with the target decision date?
5. Do you know who is inovled in the decision, their priorities, concerns, attitudes and role in the decision?
6. Do you know the customer decision making process?
7. Do you know who the competition is and how you will position your solutions?
8. Do you know what the customers value and how you will position your unique value?
9. Do you know how the customer will evaluate the business case?  Can you create a compelling business case?
10. Do you have contingency strategies, to address changes you discover in executing the plan?
11. Do you know the resources within your organization or partner organizations you need to execute the plan?  Do they understand their roles and are they committed to them?
12. Have you documented the plan?
13. Are you executing the plan, updating it based on what you learn?

Do you have a plan for this sales call?

1. Do you know how this call fits into the execution of your opportunity plan/strategy?
2. Do you have clear goals for what you want to achieve–does this move you forward in the execution of your opportunity plan?
3. Do you have stretch goals for this meeting?
4. Are the right customers participating in this meeting–do you have the people involved that enable you to achieve your goals and objectives?
5. Have you prepared the questions you need to ask?
6. Have you anticipated questions or objections the customer may have?  Are you prepared to deal with these?
7. Have you thought of the worst possible question the customer might raise in the meeting?
8. Do you have a written call plan?
9. Do you have an agenda?  Have you reviewed and agreed upon the agenda with the customer?
10. Do you know what value you will create for the customer in this meeting?
11. Are you adjusting and updating your opportunity plan based on the outcomes of this call?
12. Have you written a follow up thank you to all who participated in the meeting, updating on agreements and next steps?

Do you have a plan to achieve your quota?

1. Do you know the number of opportunities you need to close to achieve your goals?
2. Do you have a sufficient number of opportunities in the pipeline to achieve your goals?
3. Do you have the right opportunities qualified and in your pipeline?  Is it a quality pipeline?
4. Do you know the prospecting activities you need to conduct to make sure you have the right flow of qualified deals coming into your pipeline?
5. Do you know your win rate?  Do you have a plan to improve it?
6. Do you know your sales cycle time?  Are you working on strategies to compress it?
7. Do you have good flow/velocity through the pipeline?  Are you avoiding stuck deals?

Do you have a plan to manage your time this week?

1. Do you plan your calendar and meetings at least 2 weeks in advance, do you write it in your calendar?
2. Do you know how many prospecting calls you need to make this week?  Have you scheduled them into your calendar?
3. Do you have an efficient meeting plan?  Are you managing your time and travel most effectively?
4. Have you allocated/scheduled time for internal meetings and administrative tasks?
5. Do you have a meeting with your manager schedules?  Do you  have objectives for what you want to achieve in the meeting?
6. Do you have buffer time allocated within the week to handle unanticipated items?
7. Have you scheduled time for social business activities?

Do you have a plan for yourself?

1. Have you established short term, intermediate, and long term goals for what you want to achieve—both in business, in the community, with your friends and family, and for yourself?
2. Do you have an agreement with your manager on what you would like to achieve in your job, how your performance will be evaluated, and your manager’s role in coaching and supporting you?
3. Have you identified things you need to learn and develop? Do you allocate time for this every week?
4. Do you have a plan to exercise and have you scheduled it into your calendar?
5. Do you have outside interests and hobbies that you pursue?
6. Do you have a reading list?  Are you checking things off?
7. Do you have a bucket list?  Are you checking things off?
8. Do you have a mentor?  Do you leverage your mentor(s) in your development?

There are other plans you should have–account, territory, and others.

If you have a plan, are you executing it?  If not, then your plans are just wishful thinking.

If you don’t have a plan, you won’t get to where you want to go!

Related posts:

1. Evolving Your Sales Game Plan
2. Effective Sales Coaching–Closing The Loop
3. Little Things Count!

Today I was asked the question, “Do you have to keep qualifying through the sales process?”  It’s a good question–one that is too often ignored.  Before answering this, let me back up a moment and start at the beginning of the sales process.

I’ve often written that we make a mistake in the qualification phase of the sales process–we focus on qualifying the customer.  We are finding all the excuses to keep a deal in our funnel and pursue it as a sales opportunity.  Rather than qualifying, we need to focus on disqualifying–we need to focus on finding the deals in our sweet spot, eliminating all other deals.  Nothing impacts win rates more than vicious disqualification.

In rough economic times, our pipelines are not as full as we want.  Managers say, “Fill up your pipeline!”  That’s actualy pretty easy to do, we further relax our qualification criteria, chasing even poorer quality deals, further reducing our win rates.  Since win rates are lower, the “ideal pipeline volume” increases–rather than 3 time pipeline coverage, we move to 5, and we create this death spiral in pipeline and deal quality.  In tough times it’s critical to vigorously enforce your disqualification criteria–maximizing your ability to win more of the deals–freeing up time to go find more highly qualified deals, rather than wasting it on deals you can’t win.

Before I go on–what do you do with those deals you disqualify.  The other day, I was speaking to a sales person, he had disqualified a number of deals and wanted to delete them from the data base.  “They aren’t interested, they don’t want to buy.  There’s no reason to keep them in our data base.”  I see this too often–both with sales and marketing people.  As long as we are prospecting in our “sweet spot,” just because they don’t want to buy today, doesn’t mean they will never buy–we need to keep nurturing them-both through sales and marketing, so that we are prepared to engage an informed customer when they are ready to buy.  100% of your prospects in your sweet spot will buy — someday.  You need to be there when that day comes.

But let me get back on topic.  After we’ve done our job of vicious disqualification, do we stop qualifying?  Absolutely not!  The customer is continuing their process of “qualifying” us, we need to continue to look at qualifying them.  Through the sales process we continue to increase our knowledge of what the customer is trying to achieve.  We learn more–the customer learns more, needs change, priorities shift–what may have been “ideal” at the beginning of the process may be totally wrong later in the process.

We need to constantly be reassessing and re-evaluating.  Is this still the right deal?  Can we help the customer achieve what they want better than anyone else?  Is this going to be a good deal for us?  It’s tough to let go and stop.  We don’t want to abandon deals lightly–we need to continue to influence things to our advantage.  However, things change through the sales process.  Just because the deal has passed our “disqualification sort” doesn’t mean we have to stop evaluating whether we pursue it.  If it turns out to be the wrong deal, stop!  Stop wasting your time and the customer’s time.  Stop investing your company resources in trying to sell it–maybe move it back in the sales process, start over again, maybe move it back into a nurturing cycle.

We are all time poor.  We need to guard our time carefully, making sure we are focused on the deals and activities that help us produce the results we need.

Are you doing the right job disqualifying?

Are you continuously revisiting that decision through the sales process?

Related posts:

1. Rethinking Qualifying—Is This Good Business For Us?
2. Sales Manager: Stop Wasting Your Time On Coaching Meetings!
3. Coaching The Sales Process