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Written by Hamish Knox; President of Sandler in Calgary, Canada
Creating accountable, sales focused organizations in Calgary
You’ve vanished the magicians from your sales funnel and your team embraced the mindset of “always be advancing the sale,” yet as you look at your most recent sales funnel report you see a few opportunities hanging around that you were told weren’t moving forward.
What’s happened is your salespeople confused “activity” with “opportunity.” This is common especially when their prospect says “call me in six months.”
“Activities” are the attempts your salespeople make to create opportunities.
“Opportunities” are the result of activities that end with your salesperson and their prospect booking a discovery meeting (in-person or via video conference preferably due to the role body language plays in communication and creating rapport) at which they will discover if there’s s fit between what your company offers and the pain your prospect seeks to resolve.
The opportunity gets to say in your salesperson’s pipeline if they have a mutually agreed on next step with their prospect locked in their calendars (phone call, meeting, demo, proposal or presentation; the latter three only if their prospect is qualified). In my career that next step had to take place within 45 calendar days to count unless there was some clear reason why my prospect and I couldn’t at least speak in that time frame.
Your salespeople will exclaim, “but they told me to call them in six months so I’m keeping the opportunity in as a reminder!” In six months your prospect could say “call me in six months,” which means there’s no real opportunity only a lot of hopium and “reminders” aren’t kept in your sales funnel that’s what your CRM or task management software is for (I use ConnectandSell to reconnect with “call me in…” prospects).
We coach the leaders we work with that only opportunities with a real opportunity to close in the next 30, 60 or 90 days (maybe 120 if you have a long sales cycle and/or implementation timelines) get to be in your sales funnel. This causes a lot of anxiety for salespeople who see their current pipeline get cut by 30%, 50% or 80% because they don’t have a confirmed next step with each of those opportunities. It’s a pretty quick call to their prospects to say, “Prospect, I forgot to confirm when we were meeting to move the opportunity we talked about two weeks ago forward. Are you okay to get something in the calendar?”
Your salespeople will quickly discover which of their opportunities are real and which are a bunch of hope and smoke.
At your next sales funnel review meeting coach your team on the difference between an “activity” and an “opportunity” and you’ll quickly discover if hitting your quarterly target is real or not.
Until next time… go lead.
Upcoming Sandler Free Webcast
Becoming Your Sales Team’s GPS For Success
When: Tuesday June 19, 2018
Time: 12.00PM MT
Hosted by Mike Montague and featuring Sandler trainers Hamish Knox and Haley Ayraud, they will reveal how to hold salespeople accountable for the behaviors that lead them to success.
DESIGNED FOR MANAGERS & EXECUTIVES
Most leaders can relate to these statements:
- I’m unsure about what my people are doing every day.
- I’m frustrated with the need to chase salespeople and their quotas each month.
- I’ve had enough of under-motivated salespeople and high team turnover.
Learn how to hold salespeople accountable for the behaviors that lead them to success and stop spending your time and energy on things that don’t pay off.
This is a free event. We expect a very large turnout for this hot topic.
Why Salespeople Fail…
and what can you do about it!
This report is all about making and exceeding those all-important sales numbers and sales forecasts.
It’s an eye-opening look at the deficiencies of modern-day selling systems and sales management efforts, prepared by the company that literally rewrote the book on selling. This white paper provides an honest, no-nonsense approach to selling that places the salesperson firmly in control.
This white paper is a game changer if you have encountered some of these challenges…
- Unmet sales forecasts
- Painfully long selling cycles.
- Discounting to make sales, resulting in eroding profit margins.
- Hiring salespeople that don’t work out.
- Over-promising by the sales team that creates customer dissatisfaction
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