Close dates. As a B2B solution seller, I, like many others in similar roles, have spent so much time over my career obsessing over this seemingly simple data point. I mean, it’s pretty normal right? The focus of our work is finding, developing, and closing sales opportunities, and the close date is a vital piece of information that is captured, updated, and reported on ad nauseam.
Continue reading “Why close dates are bad for your sales pipeline health”
This post was written (very rapidly) as a response to a question posted on LinkedIn by John Smibert:
What causes a sales pipeline to become clogged? What should we do to get it flowing again?
With those questions in mind, and my Lean Thinking hat firmly on my head, here are some areas for consideration:
Continue reading “What causes a sales pipeline to become clogged?”
A good sales process not only helps the sales team with opportunity qualification, assessment and planning, but also supports good governance. A key aspect of sales governance in most organisations is the opportunity lifecycle, usually defined by a linear progression of stages, e.g. Suspect, Prospect, Qualified, Business Win, and Closed Won. If your organisation uses a CRM system (who doesn’t these days?), then these stages will be hard-wired into that system, and will be key indicators feeding up into management reports and dashboards upon which forecasts and critical business decisions will be made. Continue reading “Improve sales governance with a well-defined opportunity lifecycle”
As solution sellers we all want to increase our win rate, our deal size, and get deals closed faster. We also need to provide accurate forecasts to our sales leaders, all with the minimal amount of admin. To do this we need to ensure we are qualifying well and focusing on the right deals. Our sales process should help us with all these things, and not get in the way by creating excessive process overhead. Continue reading “What makes a good solution sales process?”
