Become supremely confident about achieving your sales targets

Hello Sales Reset Community

How would it feel if you were always supremely confident about achieving your sales targets and quotas?

That’s the feeling of confidence that comes from managing your sales pipeline effectively!

There’s so much about managing sales pipelines we could look at!

You can listen in to our conversation about what to include in this week’s newsletters in our new video podcast Weekly Sales Reset: Prep Talk.

After a quick review of sales pipeline foundations, we recommend you focus on three key ideas this week to manage your sales pipeline more effectively:

1. Review: Early this week, take a good, hard look at your current sales pipeline and bring every opportunity right up to date.

2. Planning: Make a plan to ensure your sales pipeline delivers your desired results.

3. Updates: Commit to daily, weekly, and monthly pipeline updates and reviews.

How you'll improve sales results this week

• Sales pipeline foundations

• Review your current sales pipeline

• Make a plan to develop the pipeline you need

• Commit to pipeline updates and reviews

• Potential Challenges

• End of Week - Reflective Practice

Sales pipeline foundations

We don’t know how you manage your sales pipeline. You might use a sophisticated CRM platform like Salesforce or HubSpot or a simple spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets.

Regardless of the tool you use, the most important thing is to keep track of all your sales opportunities in one place. Here’s the minimum information you need for every opportunity:

• Opportunity Name: So you can easily identify each opportunity.

• Contact Details: Ideally, you will identify a range of key contacts and stakeholders.

• Value: What this opportunity is worth through the lifetime of the agreement?

• Stage: Including, for example, qualification, proposal, negotiation, verbal close, legal close.

• Probability: What is the percentage likelihood of closing?

• Expected Close Date: The part of your pipeline that is the hardest to estimate.

• Single Next Action: Every opportunity should ALWAYS have a single next action to ensure momentum and effective prioritisation.

• Notes: Key details that will be valuable to you or by colleagues.

Review your current sales pipeline

One of the hardest parts of managing a sales pipeline is keeping it up to date. The reality is that things change constantly.

From experience, we know your sales pipeline is probably not completely accurate and up to date right now. It’s likely that your pipeline has:

• Old Estimates: Key data about probabilities and close dates that have not been updated. You may even have opportunities with close dates in the past!

• Missing Opportunities: Some opportunities might not have been recorded because you've been busy with other things.

• Zombies: The undead opportunities that once looked so good! And it’s hard to let go and acknowledge they’re not going to happen.

• Stalled Deals: Opportunities that don’t have an agreed single next action are likely to be stalled. What can you do to regain momentum?

The most important thing is to review your pipeline. Or at least schedule a time in your calendar early this week when you’ll bring it completely up to date.

Make a plan to develop the pipeline you need

When you’re confident your pipeline is up to date, you have all the data you need to make a plan. Here are some key pointers:

Prospecting: Are you in touch with enough opportunities? How much of your valuable selling time should you schedule for prospecting to fill your pipeline?

Prioritise: Use the 80:20 rule to invest your time disproportionately into the 20% of opportunities that will deliver 80% of the results you need.

Momentum: Make a plan for each of your highest-priority opportunities to maintain the greatest momentum.

Stay Focused on Customer Outcomes: In all of your thinking and planning with your sales pipeline, prioritise the outcomes your customers will achieve with your products and services. It’s all too easy to get caught up in our priorities. If you prioritise what your customers will achieve, you’ll achieve the greatest sales success!

Commit to pipeline updates and reviews

Here are some recommendations for how often you should update and review your sales pipeline:

• Daily: With your active opportunities, you should update your records in your sales pipeline after EVERY significant contact.

• Weekly: Get into the habit and routine of fully updating and reviewing your whole pipeline once a week. It’s probably best to schedule this as a recurring weekly activity in your calendar.

• Monthly: Every month, give yourself time to do a deep-clean of your sales pipeline and develop a clear plan of what activity you’ll need in the coming month.

Potential Challenges

Time: Managing a pipeline is less fun than speaking with customers! It’s crucial to commit the required time to managing your sales pipeline.

Estimating: Predicting the future is hard! The best strategy for this challenge is to have the courage to coach your customers about their timings. Whenever a date is discussed, dig deeper to explore its implications and who else might need to be involved.

Letting Go: It can be very hard to let go of the zombies in your pipeline. But just think of all the time you’ll free up to pursue different and better situations!

End of Week - Reflective Practice

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this Weekly Sales Reset valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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