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It’s All in the Pipeline

On average, salespeople close about one in three of the sales they try to win. But the most effective salespeople close eight out of ten.

The most effective constantly look objectively at their customers, prospects and suspects and put realistic forecasts in place as to when they expect to close business.

Not only do they have an 80% close rate, they also produce very accurate forecasts.

 

How do they do that?

By taking a professional approach to managing the business for which they are responsible.

They:

• Understand the importance of managing their personal pipelines and make time available to do it well – however busy they are – the pipeline is tomorrow’s business – and they want to be in a job tomorrow
• Use qualification checklists that allow them to look at potential deals in a consistent way
• Know their prospects’ and customers’ buying cycles – when contracts are coming up for renewal, when budgets are set and the like
• Keep in touch systematically using a contact diary to make sure that they stay in sync with their prospects’ and customers ’“itch cycles” – when they will be in the market
• Know how to ask the tough questions of a customer that qualifies a potential deal
• Generate enough alternative opportunities to “want” to ask qualification questions and not be frightened of a negative answer

·         Know if customers are telling the whole truth – how do they do that?

Winning 80% of the business you are chasing makes forecasting much more accurate. Being realistic about qualifying your chances of winning makes forecasting more accurate still.

 

But there’s a but ...

Management has to buy into building up a forecast from professionally trained salespeople. The salespeople have to buy into spending time managing their pipelines.

They should. It make good sense. If you increase your salespeople’s productivity by between 200% and 300% (eight out of ten versus one in three) you can easily afford to move to this approach to pipeline management and forecasting.

 

Get it right

Accurate forecasting is very important to any organisation. It affects people, jobs, manufacturing, investment, logistics, sales, cash flow and profits. Yet few organisations take a bottom-up build approach of the kind described above. Many prefer top-down knowledge and statistics based methods, and this can and does work in the right circumstances.

 

With the average salesperson only winning one in three deals, two thirds of salesforce selling time and resource is completely wasted right across the whole economy – at what cost? And lower close rates make accurate forecasting more difficult – at what cost?  

The better the close rate, the more accurate the forecast, the bigger will be the business benefits.

 

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If you want to know how to create a salesforce that could win eight out of every ten deals it goes for and dramatically improve the accuracy of your forecasting:

 

Call us on 0845 125 9098

 

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