I recently started working with a new client and we have been focused on establishing a more effective sales strategy and structure. The biggest challenge has been cleaning up their bloated sales pipeline.
They have some of the classic symptoms of a company with an inaccurate sales pipeline:
When I asked them how many deals in the pipeline were true opportunities that would be a good fit and close in the next one to two months, they told me they believed it was probably 25% or less. Ouch!
That’s a lot of time and effort spent chasing bad prospects and opportunities when they could have been focusing that energy on deals with a higher chance of closing. In the meantime, they’ve been worried about having the money they need to continue to reinvest in their employees and the business (and grow the business faster.) It’s a shame that these misguided efforts put them in that position.
You’ve probably never seen this scenario from your sales structure or people, right?
As I worked with the client to dig under the surface to examine what caused all of this, we started to find the causes were things that the client hadn’t even focused on. We discovered that the real causes were:
I have a question for you: As you look at this list, can you easily check off these items and truthfully say that you have all of them in place for your sales structure and people?
How do you really know if you do or don’t?