Professional Selling Skills Training: Size of Sales Pipeline

Professional Selling Skills Training: Is there a formula people can use to determine how big their sales pipeline needs to be? Your pipeline should always contain as many contacts as it takes to replace all of your business during the current sales cycle. For example, if you’re currently doing business with 25 customers and it takes six months to close a sale, then you would need to either have at least 50 prospects in your pipeline or enough prospects that would bring in the same amount of business to replace your existing business. Additionally, a quick rule of thumb is if your sales process takes more than six months, you need to add the number you need by the number of months above six times your base number. So, for a nine month sales cycle, take the base number of prospects you need (for example: 50) and add another 30% (9 months - 6 months = 3 months). In this case, you would add another 15 prospects.

Prospecting for Clients: Timeline

Prospecting for Clients: How do you know when it’s right to stop calling on what you thought was a perfect prospect? You never ever stop calling on a prospect! Rather, you slow the process down to ensure that you don’t waste your time. The key to determining when they’re no longer a good prospect is if they’ve stopped sharing with you crucial information or information that would not be readily available to others. Prospects who are turning back into suspects are many times those people who will continue to be courteous to you, but won’t extend you any new information or give you their best time. If you decide they’re no longer a hot prospect, then move the person further down in your sales process and let your communication with them be through your on-going marketing campaigns. At a later time, you can leave them a voice mail message asking them to call you back. If they don’t, then certainly they’re still a suspect. If they do call you back, don’t rush to schedule a live meeting. Rather, use the phone call as a way to see if they’re willing to provide you with some information, etc. If they quickly provide you some, then consider them back on the prospect list. If they don’t, then keep them on your suspect / marketing list.

Prospecting for Clients: Handling Hesitation

Prospecting for Clients: How do you deal with the prospect who is hesitant to make a decision?
First, you have to go back and ask yourself if you really know what their buying timeline is and if the person you’re talking to is qualified to buy. You then have to focus in on two areas: the customer’s pressure points and their decision drivers. Let’s look at both of these for a moment. If a customer truly has a pressure point, then they will buy. But often what happens is that our questions aren’t tough enough to enable the customer to understand the magnitude of their pressure point. Remember, the key is you can tell the customer all you want, but until the customer says it’s a pressure point, they won’t believe it. Second point, you have to know the customer’s decision drivers. Again, you have to ask yourself if you really know how they make a decision. You have to be asking questions that many times are not related to the sale you’re currently working on, but are designed to get the customer talking about other decisions they’ve made. When you get them talking about other decision they’ve made and how they made them, you can determine what their decision drivers are and how to leverage them.