sales pipeline
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Sure Fire Way to Know Which Sales Opportunities are the Best Sales Opportunities
- February 24, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I just love it when cool gets cooler and I’m not talking about the winter weather in New England. About a month ago, I wrote this article on Targeting and shared a generic model for scoring opportunities. George Bronten and Henrik Oquist, CEO and COO of Membrain, took note and developed the concept as a new feature for their world-class CRM application, Membrain. You have to see how we integrated this new feature into the Baseline Selling version of Membrain. In the image below, you can see that we added a scoreboard milestone at two stages of the sales process.
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What True Story Does Your Sales Pipeline Tell You about Your Business?
- November 5, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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Sales Slumps – What Causes Them and How to Fix Them
- September 28, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
During the course of a baseball season, both hitters and pitchers fall into slumps. In basketball, players slump with their outside shots and from the foul line. Football Quarterbacks go into passing slumps. Golf and Tennis pros have swing slumps. Tiger has been in a slump since Thanksgiving of 2009! (I’m sure there must be some kind of a slump that Soccer players can fall victim to, but I don’t know enough about soccer to weigh in.) With slumps being so common, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that salespeople get into slumps too. In this article, we’ll explore what causes salespeople to get into slumps, what their slumps look like, and how can they be fixed.
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A Guaranteed Fix for Inaccurate Sales Forecasts
- September 15, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Are your expectations completely unrealistic when you attempt to forecast sales for the month or quarter? For most companies, inaccurate forecasts are the norm and expectations for accuracy are insane. But that’s when companies rely on CRM applications with any of the following 10 challenges:
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The Conversation Sales Leaders Must Have with Salespeople
- July 15, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Mark was right. It turned out that we did not have a deal, as the vice president’s peer in networking was blocking it. We eventually got a meeting with him and won the deal. More important, Mark set the tone: Sloppiness would not be tolerated.
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An Ode to the Evolution of the Pipeline
- July 13, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Selling – the art and science of getting people who didn’t necessarily want what you have, to pay you a premium for it. Before you can sell anything, you must have some people to sell it to! Fill the pipeline today!
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Do We Have Sales Compensation All Wrong?
- May 6, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Should a salesperson receive the maximum commission on the big deal if there was no other activity, critical KPI’s weren’t met, and the pipeline is essentially empty?
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Fix Your Mediocre Pipeline for Accurate Sales Forecasts
- January 26, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most salespeople don’t pay too much attention to this. Even though we perform a pipeline analysis and restage the pipeline with every individual sales evaluation and comprehensive sales force evaluation we conduct, we typically discuss this exclusively at the executive level.
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Key Sales Strategies for December
- December 1, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
So let’s discuss December sales strategies. What can you do to assure that December (a short month with only 17 business days) as well as the 4th quarter and the year finish – all have a strong finish?
You won’t like my answer at all, but it’s the truth.
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Achieve More Accurate Forecasts and Sales Results Today
- November 12, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week, a new client was explaining how he called several of the nearly 300 opportunities that one salesperson had in his pipeline. My client identified 7 opportunities that had no recent activity, but had been in the pipeline for several months and were supposed to close. Imagine my client’s surprise when: