You can sell Ice to eskimos’ You can sell holes for Swiss cheese. You can sell. You hit your sales targets consistently and as such earn top commissions and sleep well at night. But, in order to keep doing so, you need to understand why it is important to build a sales funnel and pipeline to be succesful in selling. Having a quality source of leads is important to grow and develop your income and sales commission.
Perhaps you are in the 55 percent of salespeople who are struggling to hit target. If so you need to consider an important pre-sale activity.
With sales success and win rates at 21 out of every 100 it is hard enough to secure that win. Hard enough to earn the commissions, and if you are in the 55 out of 100 not hitting a target, then perhaps, hard enough to keep your job.
Successful selling does not rely on you having the gift of the gab. Nor does it involve any special techniques or tricks to ‘Close the Deal’.
To become a top salesperson you need to know one thing the top 20 percent do.
Your sales success starts long before you walk through a prospects door.
Being in the top 20 percent of sales people, earning the top commissions and incomes and avoiding the dreaded Sales Manager ‘Chat without Coffee’ will come down to you preparing your Pipeline.
Your sales pipeline is your life blood. Your sales pipeline, sales funnel, hopper, whatever you want to call it, is key to your success.
Do you Know your sales closing ratio?
Do you know how many prospects you need to speak with, present to or demonstrate your services with to make a successful sale?
If you don’t, your first action needs to be to work this out. We are all different so don’t just take your industry standard, or what your company tells you. Work out your own personal statistics.
How many leads = How many presentations = how many successful sales.
Once you have your ratio you can begin to look at the pipeline you need to ensure you are successful.
For example you might be exceptional and close one out of every two sales presentations. But, here is the thing for you. If you have no one to sell to, you will make no sales.
This is where it is important to build the numbers up in your pipe to have plenty of sales opportunities to go for.
Now, there is one important thing to remember. In my article on How Do I Succeed in Sales – Your Key Reasons You Fail I show you how pre-qualifying a prospect is important.
This is where you link the activities in that article to you building a solid, qualified Pipeline to work with.
You want quality. You want prospects who have genuine pain points that your product or service can solve. And you need to keep building your pipeline numbers so you have plenty of opportunities.
If your pipeline runs dry, your sales, your commission, your lifestyle dries up also.
Depending on the type of business you work in will be important in how your Pipeline prospecting needs to be actioned.
- You Have a Marketing Department.
- You are self-employed, A Business Owner or run an Enterprise.
- You Have a Marketing Department.
This will seem to be the ideal scenario. You open your laptop and you have emails from your marketing team, full of prospects to call. There is plenty of opportunity to go for. Your pipeline is full.
But, a word of caution. How qualified are the leads that your marketing teams are sending you? Yes, you will always have some time wasters, people that just respond to ads or outreach.
Marketing teams do get it wrong from time to time.
Campaigns flop. The wrong target audience was hit. The timing was wrong.
Many years ago, when I ran an Insurance division for a Bank, our marketing teams ran ads for a type of vehicle insurance over a Christmas period. Owing to the cost of TV advertising at that peak time (Ads for Toys and Supermarket Festive Food paid for the prime slots) Our ads went out late at night, and in between certain shows.
On return from the festive break our sales teams and people had thousands of leads and opportunities to go for. Except for one thing.
The quality of those leads was dreadful.
People had responded to our adverts, either with no intent, were bored (downtime between Christmas and New Year) or inebriated from too much festive cheer.
Our sales and return on investment (ads) tanked.
The lesson – Not all pipelines are equal, especially where quality is concerned.
You need to check the validity of the leads you are being fed. If the quality is not right, and you are not making your usual Lead to appointment ratio (see why it is important to know your figures) then raise it up line with your sales manager.
Remember, you are a sales professional. Your time (and commission) is important to you.
- You are Self-employed, A Business Owner or run an Enterprise.
Here, more so is your time important. Not only will you be spinning many plates in your business but you need to drive sales.
Again, as in the first scenario Your pipeline building is important to ensure sales success and ultimately business survival. Without sales, you have no business.
You must set aside quality time for prospect pipeline activities. The benefit you have is that you can be more targeted and focused on where you initially pitch. You can be more laser focused than the sometimes scattergun approach employed by marketing teams in larger organisations.
This way, you focus your time, your efforts and ultimately your success.
Building your pipeline to sell to is key to your sales activities. Without enough people to sell to you run out of opportunity. You need to keep topping up the pipe, but you need to put in quality leads.
For FREE information on sales challenges and what you can do to sell more and increase your income, head over to my page, You are Missing Sales by Missing the Basics