Plugging the leaks in your sales pipeline

I was doing some work last week with a team who are not very good at following up on opportunities that are in their sales pipeline. This is costing them thousands of $’s every month in missed commissions

Sales Managers love looking at pipelines. They think this helps them to predict what may be coming up in future business.

Of equal importance to what is going in to your pipeline is how are you plugging your pipe for leaks?

How to stop the pipe from leaking

If you want to plug your leaks you need discipline and strong follow up systems. In Business to Business selling today’s sale is based on your activity levels over the past 3-6 months.

The best sales people I work with have high activity levels, but more importantly they are great at plugging leaks. They know:

1. Who to follow up with
2. How to ensure they don’t forget to follow up at the right time
3. How to position their follow up meeting, call, SMS, twitter or email
4. When to follow up

If you want to more successful in sales I suggest double your follow up efforts. It doesn’t matter what system you use, as long as it works.

Double your follow up and I predict you’ll half the number of leaks in your pipe.

Each day I suggest you should aim for 10 people you can be following up with. These should be in your CRM, diary, notebook, blackberry or whatever you use to track your movements.

Posted in Sales; Tagged Sales; Posted 27 March 2009 by Steve Herzberg