CHAPTER 33

Building a Productive Pipeline

“Well, the buyers were just liars.”

I was riding the Amtrak Acela up to Boston when a cell phone-toting salesperson sitting behind me uttered this immortal couplet. It was the last day of the sales month, and my fellow passenger, whom I will call Jon, clearly was attempting to rationalize his failure to close a much-needed piece of business to one of his bosses.

Jon’s unintentional verse was almost Shakespearean in the tale of drama, treachery, and tragedy it told in just six short words. It combined a scathing indictment of the fecklessness of the prospective customer with a transparent attempt to shed any responsibility for his obvious failure to win an order that he had no doubt forecast with a high degree of certainty in an attempt to (a) curry favor and ingratiate himself with his bosses or (b) keep his job.

How often have you been caught in this trap of overcommitting on a forecast for a particular sales opportunity even though you hadn’t truly qualified the customer for your specific product and price? And then you were forced to stand in front of the entire sales team to defend the indefensible.

Without effectively qualifying customers, you have no solid understanding of the criteria they will use to make their purchase decision. In these situations, I have found that the vociferousness with which salespeople defend their actions or refuse to take responsibility for them, just like Jon, is usually in inverse proportion to the level of qualification that took place. You don’t want to be that guy.

Strengthening your pipeline is an important task. It requires that you be utterly pragmatic and a bit ruthless in how you assess the quality of the sales opportunities on which you are working. The goal is to hack away the deadwood that populates your pipeline and consumes valuable selling time that you need to devote to customers who actually will make the decision to purchase from you.

A pipeline can only be as strong as its weakest link. Invariably that weakest link is the salesperson. Is your pipeline populated by sales opportunities that are past their expiration dates? Which prospects are not truly product- and price-qualified? Which ones are you clinging to in an attempt to lull yourself into believing that there is safety in numbers?

All these behaviors can lead to a vicious sales cycle. A salesperson loads up a pipeline with weak, unqualified sales opportunities in an effort to demonstrate hard work to the manager. These weak prospects consume a disproportionate amount of the salesperson’s selling time, leaving little time to devote to strong prospects. Which leads to difficult conversations like the one Jon was having with his boss.

I only heard the last line of the conversation between Jon and his boss, who I’ll call Tracy. But I can easily imagine what transpired before I tuned in.

“Hey, Tracy. This is Jon.”

“Jon.” Silence.

“How’s it going? ”

Silence. Tracy was not going to make this easy for Jon.

“Uh, so we just finished the meeting with Consolidated.”

Silence. Tracy liked torturing salespeople with his silence.

“Well, uh, it didn’t go as we hoped.”

“Why not? ”

“They decided to go with the other guys.”

“Why? ”

“I dunno. It seems like they changed their decision criteria.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. Probably the other guys can do something we can’t.”

“And we’re just finding this out now?”

“Well, they didn’t say anything before.”

“Didn’t say? Or you didn’t ask?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know.”

“Actually, Jon, it sounds like they made their decision a while ago.”

“No, not at all.”

“Wasn’t it just last week that you were absolutely positive that you were going to close the Consolidated order this month?”

“Well, the buyers were just liars.”

Here are three strategies to strengthen your pipeline and pave the way for easier forecast meetings with your sales manager.

1. Disqualify the losers. Let’s be blunt. Too many sales opportunities in your pipeline are losers. I am not using “loser” as a pejorative to insult these customers. What I mean is that these deals are losers for you. That your chances of winning them are extremely low. But by virtue of the fact that they are in your pipeline means that you are spending selling time you can’t afford to waste on sales opportunities that will never turn into an order for you.

Working with the losers will have a measurable negative impact on your sales. Let’s begin by looking at your selling time. Various studies show that salespeople spend the majority of their work week on nonselling activities. An Accenture/CSO Insights study found that, on average, sales reps spent only 42 percent of their time selling. Indeed, one study found that high-performing sales reps spend only 55 percent of their time selling. So in order to make the math easy, let’s assume that you spend only 50 percent, or two and a half days, of your work week selling. How much time do you spend on the losers? You may say that you don’t spend that much time with them. But if they are losers, they shouldn’t get a minute of your sales time.

If you’re at 90 percent of quota but you can increase the amount of selling time you have by 10 percent by disqualifying all the losers in your pipeline, you suddenly have a chance to use the strategies from this part of the book to successfully qualify sales opportunities that can put you over the top.

How do you know that you have successfully weeded the losers out of your pipeline? Here’s the clue. Stop being defensive when discussing certain sales opportunities in a sales meeting or in a pipeline review with your manager. And start having positive proactive discussions about sales strategies and closing deals.

2. Requalify the qualified. Things change. Recall my Uncertainty Principle of Selling from Chapter 10. The very act of buying necessarily changes the buyer’s requirements. As buyers learn more about the potential solutions for their requirements, they will also learn more about their requirements. As they gather more information and, most important, insights from various sellers about how to meet their needs and address their pain points, they become more educated about the existing options. They become smarter. One outcome of this change is the very real possibility that they are no longer your qualified prospects. Perhaps their needs have grown beyond your capabilities. Or they have discovered that they can resolve their pain points with a significantly smaller investment than they originally planned. You have to stay on top of this at all times. If you’re struggling to meet quota, can you really afford to spend time working a prospect that is no longer qualified?

Here’s another reason to requalify sales opportunities: You can’t take your prospects’ interest for granted. Their interest in you and your solution is like an organic entity—they are subject to change. Just because they were once qualified does not mean that they still are.

Lastly, you also can’t count on the customer to tell you that you are no longer in the game. Customers will go radio silent and just stop communicating with you when they’re no longer considering your offer. This can be frustrating. However, they also have no incentive to tell you bad news. No one likes delivering bad news. Besides, perhaps the decision maker needs to tell her superiors that she evaluated multiple vendors before making a choice, so you are kept in the dark about the company’s intentions even though you are no longer under consideration. You’re still selling, but the customer is no longer buying!

3. Plan for the end game. What is the game plan for all the sales opportunities in your pipeline? How will you get them from where they are today to an order? It’s important to know this for every customer in the pipeline.

Selling is a team effort. For a team to succeed, every player has to understand his or her role. Keep in mind that one of the most essential members of your sales team is your customer. Selling is not something that happens to customers. They fully participate in the process (though they like to call it buying). Like any individual player, your customers have to be fully informed about the role they are playing and the expectations you have for their performance in order for the team to achieve its goals.

Invariably this plan will change as the result of your sales efforts. But you still need to map it out. It’s an integral part of answering the question, “Why is this customer going to buy from you?” It’s not all about the product or your price. As I have stressed throughout this book, any success you experience will be due as much to how you sell as to what you sell. How are you going to get your customers across the finish line? The answer is by bringing them into your plan, committed to playing their role to the end.

In sum, strengthening your pipeline means nothing more than effectively qualifying—and continually requalifying—your customers as they move through their buying processes. This means that you have to revisit hard questions about your value and suitability for their needs, their budgets, and their time frames.