To achieve your sales targets

Most of my posts are generally related to marketing and not direct sales. This one is , however directly related to a major issue that sales managers face when leading a sales team selling to B2B customers.

When you lead a sales team, you build your forecast based on the probability given to a deal by the sales person. If the sales person doesn’t understand the priority of the customer, then she may ascribe a probability which she believes, but the customer doesn’t believe.

For any solution that is provided, there’s an impact that the product/service has on the business. The higher the impact, the better is the chance that the sale will happen fast. However their is another variable, that needs to be understood. That is about the urgency, from the customer perspective. Only if the Impact is high and the urgency is high, then the sale will happen, fast.

Here I am talking mainly about products/services that are being bought for the first time. If its a repeat purchase, where, everything is known and its only a matter of routine, then the logic, in the preceding paragraph doesn’t matter.

Now returning back, to my earlier argument, if the impact is low, but there is an urgency to get something done, then the order will get placed fast. For example, a company may be wanting to revamp their website. They already have an existing website. So getting the new website may not directly have a major impact to the business. But if it’s something that has been getting delayed for a long time, then the order will get formalised fast.

On the other hand, if something can improve production by 30%, but if the investment needed or the amount of disruption it can cause are high, then management may not treat it as so urgent. It may be good to have, but since nothing is “broken” yet, it gets pushed into the back burner.

Then there are the obvious cases, where, the customer thinks that they don’t want to experiment with a new technology and they pass the project forever.

So now it’s important that the sales person understand and question the customer on their priorities, the impact the product/service will have on their business and the urgency for doing it.

There will also be cases, when the management wants to showcase some new initiatives to their share holders or there is a new government ruling. So even though the impact may or may not be large, it suddenly acquires urgency. By questioning the customer on their reason, for wanting to go for the new product/service, you will be able to understand the dynamics which is playing out internally within the company.

That will make the sales forecasts more reliable. It is always better to have a few cases, where the probability is certain , versus lots of cases, where the probability is suspect.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!