SalesForce Training - Training & Consulting

The Sales Management Challenge
You’re a sales manager. You run sales meetings. Your team seems to be busy.  They’re able to provide you with lots of updates on sales calls they’ve attended and where they think they are in the selling cycle.  And if you had a nickel for every time one of your reps’ prospects was forecasted at 90% closed, you could afford not to be a sales manager anymore.

So then you go on some sales calls, and you’re starting to see the problem.  Chances are it is only one of two things.  Your reps are simply spending too much time with the wrong prospects, or they are with potentially the right prospects, but are not qualifying them effectively.  What you need to instill in them is a true measure of where they are in the prospect’s buying cycle, and this comes not from their own subjective whims, but by implementing key criteria to determine if a prospect is truly qualified…and likely to move forward in our selling cycle.

The SalesForce Solution
For this we have a solution, and its called the Sales Pipeline Management Program.  Sales Pipeline Management is designed to accomplish one objective, improve your close ratios by understanding and maintaining the required sales activities and understand where they are in the prospect’s “buying cycle”.

How It Works
The Sales Pipeline Management program ensures that your sales team has a clearly defined set of criteria for;

1. Understanding what is a prospect, and what is only an opportunity;
2. Ensuring that your reps’ prospects only fall into certain probability categories based on a pre-determined set of conditions;
3. Utilizing the Sales Process Control Letter and the Sequence of Events map to help enhance the communication with the prospect and maximize their engagement in the process.   

 
With the Sales Pipeline Management Program, you’ll know where your reps stand at each step in the sales process, and they will spend more time with worthwhile prospects, while minimizing or eliminating time spent on fringe prospects or low probability opportunities.  By maintaining the right set of activities, your team will move more prospects into the “true” 90% category, and from there, to the closing stage.

Do You Need It?
Ask yourself the following:

• Do your reps have a defined set of criteria for evaluating where a prospect is in the sales process?
• Are your reps consistent in defining an opportunity versus a prospect?
• Can your reps tell you, with confidence, their average selling cycle?
• Can your reps build an activity plan that starts with dials per day based on their income goals?
• Do your reps know how many appointments are needed to generate a single prospect?
• Do your reps utilize a Sales Process Control letter and map out a Sequence of Events with their prospects?
• Do your reps avoid spending too much of their time chasing bad prospects?

If any of your answers to these is “No”, then what’s far more likely is that your rep hasn’t earned the right to ask for the business yet…they aren’t even close.  Proper pipeline management is essential if you want to know where your reps are in the prospect’s buying cycle.  That so-called 90% closed, is more like 9%, or perhaps 0.9%.  Because, we’re pretty sure that the 90% figure you’re hearing so often isn’t based on anything much more than a gut-feel.  Our reps need to have a clear set of criteria for the prospects and where they are in the buying cycle.

Get Started
Please click here to evaluate your team’s understanding of how to qualify a prospect.