Achieve best-ever December sales results by focusing on your customers' outcomes

Hello Sales Reset Community

With thoughts turning to time off over the holiday period, there’s still time to finish the year with your best-ever December sales performance.

This week’s Weekly Sales Reset is all about managing your opportunity pipeline more effectively.

Early December is a great time to focus on your best opportunities.

When it comes to managing your opportunity pipeline, most salespeople know these four rules of effective pipeline management:

1. Know your numbers: Based on your most recent performance, you must have a plan for how many opportunities you need at each stage of your pipeline.

2. Prospecting: Effective pipeline management starts with a surplus of opportunities. Filling your pipeline with more opportunities than you need gives you the confidence to step away quickly when opportunities begin to stall.

3. Prioritise: Never treat all of your opportunities as equally important. The 80:20 rule is particularly important in managing your pipeline.

4. Constant Review: Review and clear out your pipeline rigorously. For most salespeople, this should be a weekly review.

You probably already know these rules.

How rigorously and effectively are you applying them?

What to do with your single most significant opportunity

Let’s assume you’ve just completed your pipeline review.

You’ve just clarified your single most significant opportunity. What’s the most important thing you can do to make the win more likely this side of the holidays?

Every situation is different, but here’s our best guess about the most critical thing you can do to win your most significant opportunity in the next two to three weeks. Or carry it into January in the best possible condition.

1. Time: Block out some high-quality time and put yourself physically in a place where you won’t be distracted.

2. Review: Review the proposal document for your most significant opportunity as if you’ve never seen it before. This is especially important if you’ve used a standard proposal template. (From our experience, you may realise you’ve not yet created a specific proposal document for this opportunity. Now’s the time to fix this. FAST!)

3. Stakeholder Perspectives: Examine your proposals intently from the perspective of each of the major stakeholders. Empathise with their priorities by putting yourself in their shoes.

4. Improve: Identify where and how your proposals can be improved, probably by focusing more effectively on the measurable customer success each stakeholder needs. Do all the most important things you’ve discussed appear in your proposals?

5. Collaborate: Arrange to meet and speak with your customer champion(s) to develop a better version of your proposals.

6. Planned Re-Submission: Agree with your champion(s) when and how to re-submit your improved proposals to be considered and potentially approved before the holidays and in time for implementation in the New Year.

If you have time, you might repeat this exercise for another one or two opportunities.

But don’t get distracted by trying to do this for everything in your pipeline.

Invest disproportionate time and effort in your most significant situations. That’s why 80:20 is so essential.

Join us in our FREE Workshop this week

Join us on Tuesday at 4:30 pm UK time for this week’s Sales Reset Stories Workshop.

Every week, we share stories about the theme of our Weekly Sales Reset in a small group discussion.

It will be great to hear your stories and learn from your experiences managing your pipeline and focusing on your best opportunities.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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