Man I get a chuckle when I listen to the average sales person. No offense to those that are beyond this place in their career but I cannot get past this one annoying mindset. Sales people in general want to pigeon hole the entire landscape of leads into possible customers and exude frustration when the people they are talking to “do not get it”.

Guess what Mr. and Ms. Sales person, you are the ones without a clue. See the goal of a sales person is not to convince or cajole. It is not to smile and deliver a great pitch. The goal of any sales person looking to make sales consistently is to listen for the needs that create opportunity.

Qualification is not a tool of asking questions to decide that someone can somehow fit into your pipeline. It is not a check list of behaviours and issues that give you permission to spew solutions on someone. Qualification is the filtering of many leads into one opportunity.

What you are doing when you start discovery and begin qualifying someone is figuring out if they are worth your time. This is not meant to reflect poorly on the prospect, simply to elevate the value of your time. You only have so much of it and for every person you talk to that is not engaged and ready to act, that is time wasted.

Stop looking for opportunity and start weeding out leads that are not opportunity. Become more critical of the business requirements needed to be allowed to work with you. Start having expectations and if they are not met then rule people out. It is rare that a potential buyer that truly needs what you are selling will omit details. That is, if they are really the person making the decision.

Qualifying is a tool for maximizing your time. It is a process that many discuss but rarely seem to explain why. It is simple, if you find people that will truly benefit from what you are offering, and they have the time and money to make a decision, you will sell. If you do not find this out you are wasting time.

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The one area that people seem to ignore the need for consistent and thorough follow up is early in the process, the area we refer to as above the pipe. Most sales people tend to have a very Glengarry Glen Ross approach, give a lead one try, and if you do not get the desired result, toss the lead. Some baseball fans are more open minded, they take the three strikes and out approach, they don’t toss it till after the third try.

I understand that sales people would rather be selling than prospecting, sad that some even see these as different things as opposed to part of the same process; but if your customers don’t come to you like they do at Burger King, you need to prospect.

The raw material for creating prospects is leads, the way to convert leads to prospect is follow through. In these days of genteel euphemisms, our marketing friends have coined the expression “lead nurturing”, which is exactly correct.

Depending who you read, it could take a minimum of six touch points to gain the attention of a lead enough to engage them in a conversation that will determine if they are in fact a potential prospect. Depending on the number of prospects you need to hit your number, that’s a lot of follow up, that’s a lot of planning, that means you’ll need a process.

We recommend and use a process we call T – C – E:

Touch – Everyone we meet (contextually), is added to our monthly newsletter data base, The Pipeline, they have the opportunity to safely unsubscribe, but we also make an effort to have interesting articles relevant to all involved in B2B sales.  This way at least once a month, and at times with special announcements each of these leads sees us, our name our logo at least 15 to 16 times a year.

Thanks to the tools built in to e-mail marketing tools this also give us great visibility into what diffe3rent people are reading, what is of interest, what is not.  Specifically to follow up, we reach out if someone demonstrates strong interest in a specific article.  A few years back, I saw that a lead, one who I met with six months prior, and had called about 60 days before the article appeared, seemed very interested in an article on cold calling.  How do we define interested, he accessed the article 18 in three days; I followed up with a call, “Tom how you doing?” I asked; he said “you know Tibor, I was just thinking about you.”  No kidding I thought.  We met, we did the program, and we are still meeting on an ongoing basis.

Contact – With each lead we devise a plan to contact them directly over and above the regular e-mail campaign cycle.  These are usually calls, but at times direct e-mails, special invitations to events directed at them specifically as opposed to broad based generic mailings.  This dictates that you do rank your leads, we use a simple 1 – 2 – 3 ranking, with one getting the greatest focus, 2 next, etc.  It is important that you have clear definitions for each of the rankings, and depending on your business, you could have prospect that rank as 1 for one service, and maybe rank as a 3 for another product.  The clear definitions will allow you to move leads up and down the rank scale and make sure that your best shots are always visible.

Since we sell to sales organizations, our 1 ranked leads get a direct call – Contact – every three months, since most sales organization seem to live their lives quarterly, (some these days monthly).  When we contact with them we have a specific objective, getting a face to face meeting; so we know what is a good outcome from the follow up, and what is not.  If we do get the appointment, and it leads to a conversation they get moved to the Engage category, and enter our pipeline management process.  If they do not engage, we reassess their ranking, and place them back accordingly.  Or sometimes not, if their circumstances had changed to the point where they are no longer a viable lead, they get put back in to the general pool, and start the process from zero.

Engage – Engage is the most straight forward of the three, if the appointment is good (we have a mutually agreed on next step), they, as stated above, they move into the next phase of the process, the pipeline.  If they do not progress through to a transaction, they are either removed from the lead pool for specific reasons; they are put into the general pool for re-engagement at some point in the future, or placed back into the Contact phase.  They always, with rare exception or if they have been removes from the lead pool, continue to get touched and receive our newsletter and related monitoring.

While this may seem laborious, it is not, you can systemize and automate most of it except the monitoring, which allow us to be aware of trends and other things that benefit us in other ways.  But a thorough follow through regime at the point above the pipe gives us and those clients that adopt is a great jump on sales, accelerating the velocity of the sales and shortening their sales cycles, not to mention a great deal of insight that pays other dividends.

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While they may not always admit it, sales people are really gatherers and hoarders at heart, that is why there is premium paid for real hunters.  When you ask most sales people what they need to do better they say “I need more accounts”,” I need more territory”, as though more stuff equals more results and output.  Completely ignoring the fact that having “more” means having to deal with manage and deal with more accounts and people.

Hunting on the other hand takes focus, concentration and elimination of unnecessary distractions.  Think cheetah; pick his prey and goes after it with determined precision.

So while people will tell you they are hunters, closers, deal makers, what have you, they really are not.  You know what gives them away, their pipeline, full of crap, noise and distractions.  They gather, hoard and hang on to everything because one day it may close, and eight-track will make a comeback along with Jethro Tull.

Let’s look at your pipeline in a couple of different ways.  As one great sales person, Mark Pfeifer, once said, pipelines are like a vast lawn in a garden.  When you are sitting on the patio of your 30th floor penthouse, it looks shiny and green, a thing of beauty to enjoy.  Then you go down and realize that half the lawn is weeds, man what do you do now?  If you pull the weeds, and you go back up to your patio, the view is not that nice, patches of brown remind of the poor state of your garden, and you realize that now you are going to have to work to make it all nice, green and pretty again.  As if, most sale people let the weed grow back and go back to pretending they have a full pipeline, which they do, but full of what?

Another way to look at it is to acknowledge that your pipeline is much like an artery carrying the precious lifeblood of sales success.  Yet most reps just allow the plaque and crap to build up, causing clots and reduced flow of deals, activities and things that need to pass unencumbered to create deals and success.

Reps need to have enough confidence in their ability to qualify, or more accurately disqualify those things that are not going to happen.  If it you have had some success selling, just look at the attributes of those successes, and any thing that does not look like it, get it out of your pipeline.  Yes, everyone is allowed a long shot or two, but not a bag full of date cheese clinging to the artery, waiting for a sales stroke and financial heart attack.

So, What’s in Your Pipeline?

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