Spring Means Yardwork, and effective sales KPIs are difficult

Spring is in full swing as I write this; the lawn is freshly cut, flowers - planted, dead limbs - removed, and the house's exterior is in good working order and appearance for Spring. 

Since my wife tasked me with making the exterior of the house presentable, I measure success in these ways. She also instructed and reminds me to make every effort to avoid it looking “tacky”. Admittedly, I have not discovered a way to measure the non-tacky goal.  

When I review what needs to be done this spring, summer, or fall, it would be easy to only measure those two things.  If I were to only measure these outcomes and not the other byproducts of achieving these goals, the model would break quickly. And, by only measuring the 2 outcomes, the order and appearance for spring measures do not allow me insight into what else had to happen for this to be achieved.

Many other tasks had to be completed or started to arrive at this now clean and neat home exterior.  Typically, I might be sore because I delayed until the last minute or worked sun up to sundown over a weekend or two to get the yard back in shape.  But this year was different: last fall, chemicals were applied to strengthen the grass root system, mower blades were sharpened before winterizing the mower, winter grass was sewn to fill in bare spots, and low spots of soil were leveled to even the surface, and prevent water from collecting in pools that kill grass over time.  Over the winter, mulch was spread, and windows were washed on warm days.  All of those maintenance items (tasks) were consistently worked between last fall and this spring. 

But we're not here to discuss gardening tips.

Do you want your sales team to close the right deals for the right type of client more regularly?

Like a tidy yard and home, sales performance measures should not be limited to measurements at the end of a transaction only (Ex: Revenue, Bookings, % of quota attainment).  Sales management best practices should be consistently applied and measured to ensure revenue or pipeline growth happens for the individual and enterprise.  To get the best practices to the point of delivering the results, it is critically important to focus on earlier points in a sales process to understand what can be measured and what is driving the successful or unsuccessful outcome. 

Leaders and salespeople need to measure the more relevant, early parts of their selling effort and process.  What is gained by measuring earlier portions of the process is an understanding of what leading indicators exist for deals that do not close, close fast, or require a great deal more resources to close.  By measuring early-stage data and indicators and deal data, you can more effectively and expediently win with the insights you uncover. 

By first determining the clients you want to work with (Ideal Client Profile), you are better equipped to recognize them early in the sales cycle or speak more directly to their pain and how using your solution or service elevates their business to attain their goals.  By recognizing this early, you can prioritize the deal, add resources to win, make appropriate concessions where necessary, and serve the client’s needs.  Sounds fun, right?  

Too often, we compete for every deal the same way: get someone to start a conversation, define their needs or pain, shoehorn our prepackaged solution into their needs, and price it to win.   This is a flawed system for trying to grow your business.  The following is an example of a client I worked with to illustrate where some businesses start to build more effective sales organizations by taking action on the earlier stages of the process to ensure better and more consistent outcomes.     

An Example

A firm staffed with 2, and later 3, salespeople used measures of total pipeline size (USD) and Total Year-To-Date Closed Won deals (USD). At first glance, these are topline measurables, time-bound, and specific.  It's a pretty good starting place for most founders/owners, sales leaders, and salespeople, but it’s not enough to know the outcome.  At any point, those same people need to know if they are behind or ahead and how to extend a lead or regain ground in their sales efforts.   The initial challenges were that the pipeline value had not changed in the past six months, very few new deals were closing, and leadership had tried a few things to fix this but could not change the outcome or flat-to-down forecast of the next six months. 

They needed a fix that addressed their current revenue generation, near-term closing tactics for identified deals, and a way to systematically attract additional good business opportunities.

Job 1: Close deals and get wins quickly.

Quickly closing a deal was a morale boost and proved that they could improve outcomes with some process tweaks and laser focus. 

Actions: We prioritized late-stage deals (6 Deals: we documented and priced a scope of work. 1 deal: actively negotiating stage).  We quickly learned that the one deal we negotiated had no plan for what we were willing to offer or accept.  With a quick, one-hour strategy working session, we arrived at what we were willing to offer and accept, the impact on revenue and potential profit we were willing to give up, and made the offer via phone to the Director of Procurement.  Terms were verbally accepted, and we had the edits and signature by the next morning.  (Win 1).

The 6 deals we priced and scoped were less successful.   3: >6 months old, and the prospect had not communicated recently.  We called and emailed each contact at the prospect- 1 was no longer at the company, 1 did not respond, and 1 let us know they awarded the deal to another organization.  The remaining 3 deals: open deals. Only 1 had a contact who was authorized to sign a purchase order for the deal.  Those 6 became 1 very quickly.  The other 2 that were active had to be qualified again, and we had to get to the right audience within the organization. 

After resetting the stage with the right qualification steps, we could reenter the deals confidently and propose reasonable scopes of work to the right people to meet their goals.  We lost both to an incumbent provider.  Our actual role in the deal, we learned, was to price-verify the current provider to ensure the prospect was getting a fair price.  You may not experience these deals exactly, but it is safe to say that we have all not won a deal because of qualification issues, follow-up issues, decision-maker access, and similar sales pitfalls.

Job 2: Clean up the pipeline

Cleaning the pipeline (of clutter) was likely the most difficult for the two initial salespeople on the sales team.  They had to admit their solution was not a good fit for some prospects, really had no chance of winning some deals they wanted, or were too low on an organizational chart to qualify the deal as active beyond a lead stage. Of this group of deals, all but 10 had to start over or be closed entirely.

This sounds negative, but the outcome was a concise list of high-value, high-potential prospects we could pursue and evaluate.  Their pipeline transformed from poorly qualified or unresponsive opportunities to a pipeline of 10 deals that were in their ideal client profile, able to be qualified systematically, and the company had the internal resources to allocate to these deals. They won 5 of those deals within the quarter. 

Job 3: Generating more opportunities, sustainably

This is a challenge for most business owners and sales teams that compete in the B2B sales space, largely because there are so many options available for lead generation. You can barely scroll Google or a business website without a popup, targeted ad, or other advertisement claiming to Guarantee Leads“fast!”.

 The enemy of success is complexity.

 Simple was, and is, the key to sustainability.  Having a Framework for how, where, and why your solution exists and a documented idea of what the future should look like gives you the freedom to make decisions that lead to the goal, not decisions that are a bandaid for part of a current problem or not integrated to a larger strategic objective.  The task list was long to build a pipeline, but we could break the tasks into time-based to-do items assigned to individuals, not the group. 

 If everyone is responsible, no one is.

With the leadership team, we decided to attack the market in 3 ways, simultaneously and specifically.

We focused our pipeline build on 1. Past, inactive clients with a targeted “Come Back” offer; 2. Two specific verticals and the customers within 35 miles of the office where we could network with them in person and focus on specific job title networking events; 3. Regional Tradeshows for those same verticals with a reduced low-cost of entry (not discounted) product offering that we positioned for those verticals to give us an initial opportunity where we could later expand by offering additional services and solutions. 

With this focus and assignment of duties, we were able to first test, adjust, and improve our message to prospects and generate prospects in our target market, in our target geography, expand our client footprint strategically, and recapture some of our past clients and derive additional work for existing clients.   The pipeline grew to over 50 active target market deals, the value increased substantially, and the quality of the solutions improved due to the intimate industry knowledge and messaging quality to the prospect about the project, and to their clients with our solution. 

Now What?

Maybe Nothing. Maybe you have already solved this or similar problems in your business.

Maybe Something: Your path to more revenue starts with a confidential, free meeting with me. You may need to create a system for getting sales back on track or you may need to reenergize your sales team to grow revenue or stop the decline in sales. Taking this free assessment is one way to do a quick assessment of the state of your sales operations. Click here, spend 10 minutes, get your sales organization’s overview, for free.