Sales Strategy and Customer Decision Making

Brief background: Last week I conducted a webinar called “The Feel Good Funnel” which focused on balancing the quantity of opportunities in a company’s pipeline vs. the quality of those opportunities. Huthwaite’s position is that almost every sales organization’s pipeline is overweight on quantity – quantity of deals and quantity of dollars – at the expense of quality. If a more rigorous qualification process is applied to every deal we will see many of those deals either a) move back in stage, b) reduce in dollar amount, c) push out the close date – or d) taken out of the pipeline altogether. What is the cost of having sales reps working opportunities that are not properly qualified? Think about it in terms of travel costs, management time, lost-opportunity cost, supporting resources, etc. Answer – huge.

Question: During the webinar we received many questions. One interesting one was “can you talk more about aligning the sales strategy to customer decision making. I.e., what are the types of strategies you could deploy?”

What I really liked about this question was it joined two important points that are not commonly joined. That is, a) sales strategy, b) Customer decision making. So many sales strategies and processes are employed based on a series of actions that the sales person must take. A far more effective and successful approach is bringing in the customer’s reality, and examining the commitments that we need the customer to make at each stage. From that, a more realistic and accurate strategy can be developed.

I’m curious – as you look at the pipeline activities in your CRM, what percentage of those are seller-based activities vs. buyer commitments? Our research shows a far greater percentage of seller-based activities and milestones. What does your pipeline say?

Eating Our Own Dog Food and Loving It!

Working in Silicon Valley in the 90s meant being subjected constantly to a barrage of hip, dot-com buzzwords and phrases of which “eating our own dog food” was prominent. There were many others of course which gave rise to a game that was played at meetings called “buzzword bingo” where you could tick-off buzzwords used during that meeting for your own entertainment. Of course conference calls lent themselves perfectly to this activity (apparently, not that I’d know – although I will admit in our office there was once a pool on how many times the word “conceptually” would be used by Marketing during a call and the final score exceed the highest bet by some margin! – of course I am sure they had their own pool on the buzzwords we used too.)

Let's Be Honest: Excellence Takes Hard Work

Following on from my post on the Short Cut Culture some of you have emailed me to ask about whether I believe there is a broader context to this and indeed I do. We have begun to celebrate and tolerate mediocrity in all its forms as a way of avoiding standards that take hard work to attain and to hide behind it as some kind of great equalizer. Either way it has made the quest for excellence the path of increasing resistance.