Managing sales? What is that? A frightening number of CEOs are so accustomed to handling sales on their own that even when they do get around to hiring a sale team, they neglect to put in place a process for building and tracking a sales pipeline. A sure sign that a sales organization is suffering from what Jennifer Fremont Smith calls “no processitis”: “Sales people will make optimistic statements with no hard data.”
Fremont Smith had founded four companies and is now the vice president of HighStart, a Boston-based consulting firm that helps bring new products to market. In each case, her first order of business was to build a sales pipeline.
Simply put, your sales pipeline is the amount of business you attempt to close in a given month, quarter, or year. It is usually presented as a spreadsheet that tracks all of the business your sales force has pursued in the form of requests for proposal. As time passes, you can begin to track what share of sales you close. If that share is consistent, you should be able to forecast sales with greater accuracy, which will give your sales team greater confidence and help operations staff plan accurately for future demand. You will also glean information on where your sales team falls short: For example, is your conversion rate low, or are you converting plenty of customers, but only getting a small share of their total business?
Fremont Smith and several other savvy CEOs are very keen on using sales pipeline data in order to maximize conversions—and minimize excuses. Here’s how they do it.
Continues at: How to Manage a Sales Pipeline.
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