When opening this post, you may have been expecting to read more about SMART data, using your CRM to determine where your opportunities are getting stuck. Alternatively, you may have been expecting to learn more about Creative Closing techniques to move Sales through faster.
Both above points are important. However, the one single action you can take to ensure Flow within your Sales pipeline is to qualify your opportunities correctly from the outset, before entering into your Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). If you fail to qualify correctly you may enter opportunities with a low Opportunity Quality Score (OQS). Another way of phrasing this is put garbage in to your CRM, get garbage out, guaranteed!
Opportunities with a low OQS will simply dilute your focus, resulting in you investing significant energy in chasing opportunities that may not even be real at this time; whilst potentially affecting your relationship with future customers, that are currently not in a purchasing position.
You can use the easy to remember BRACE model below to ensure you qualify your opportunities from the outset and keep your opportunities Flowing through your pipeline.
- Budget – available?
- Requirements – are you selling outcomes your customer currently requires?
- Approval – are you speaking to the project decision makers?
- Competitors – actions may be affecting the market, delaying sales
- Evaluation – Is the customer sold on the idea of your product?
I encourage a pool of questions that you’re comfortable will to ensure you cover the BRACE model with your opportunities, feel free to contact SalesAde if you need support in building these questions. You always want to ensure flexibility in Sales, be careful not to over qualify any opportunity.
By Qualifying well from the outset, you will improve the quality of your opportunity pipeline, allowing you to focus your resources on key opportunities and keeping your pipeline moving.
Effective qualifying will also free up more of your time for prospecting activity and adding more quality opportunities to your pipeline. You may be familiar with Pareto’s principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 Rule. In business, with this rule of thumb, it is assumed that 80% off your Sales are generated from 20% of your customers!
Invest time to Qualify, to create more time to prospect and ensure a quality pipeline!
If you would like to learn more about Maintaining Sales Flow, please contact SalesAde
