A topic that comes up often with my sales training and keynote speaking clients is pipeline management and forecasting. It seems like a rather dry subject but it’s vital for sales success, everything also is built upon it.
This is a fundamental sales truth that many sales leaders and sales teams ignore:
You need very specific ideal targeting criteria and prospect segmentation or you will never hit your revenue goals in B2B Sales and Enterprise Sales. Your sales pipeline’s dollar amounts don’t matter if your pipeline is full of mediocre poor fit prospects.
Without a well defined targeting criteria the following things often happen:
- Your sales pipeline is clogged with deals that never move or take way too long to close
- Your personal prospecting and marketing efforts at the top of the funnel are taking way too much time and resources in comparison to the qualified leads and deals that move through your sales funnel
- When you close a deal, the client is difficult or you have to do a ton of work to “make it fit.”
- Your mediocre leads refer more mediocre opportunities to you
- Your salespeople give up, quit and walk away – they’re doing all the steps but the volume of activity doesn’t equate to results or income
- As a sales leader you can’t forecast well, you blame your process or your salespeople but it’s actually the quality and lack of consistency of prospective client entering your sales funnel.
I call it “living in your A Zone” and those A’s are companies that fit 5-7 key criteria that make them part of the 20% of your total potential market that’s going to give you 80% of your income and revenues.
This in a short excerpt from a sales keynote I delivered at Greater Vancouver Board of Trade a few years back:
If you’re looking for a keynote speaker or sales training session that will help your team get laser focused hit me up and let’s talk!
