Full of Clap or Full of Crap?

Is your current pipeline bursting with opportunities? Is your CRM showing a rosy build of sales pipeline?

But wait!

You are still taking a hit in sales forecast. You are still finding it hard to close a deal, least to say meet quota. You are discounting more.

If the above sounds familiar, read on.

For those who find this otherwise, good for you. You can totally skip this post. You are meeting or exceeding your sales targets with a breeze. Building a healthy pipeline and closing them is not really an issue right now.

Back to those who find the above scenario so unpleasantly familiar.

The first indication of a problem can be found in the sales opportunities – the aging days. Aging days, in sales, is defined as the day the clock starts ticking when it was flagged as a “qualified” lead in the system. Depending on your line of business and industry norm, if the aging of each opportunity is more than your average closure days, then those opportunities are more often than not unqualified, not genuine, or had turned “cold duck” due to poor follow up.

If you are currently in such a situation, we highly suggest re-qualify them and either remove them or mark them as lost. Move on to work on other opportunities that is worth your time.

Having high aging days opportunities in the pipeline can be attributed to a few things :

• - Lack of follow up from sales. Some of these are leads from marketing, which many sales do not wish to follow up as they are deemed as qualified marketing leads but unqualified sales leads ;

• - A smoke screen. The pipeline is “beefed” up to look good on paper due to constant sales pressure from management ;

• - In some rare cases, it is related to “locking” an account due to a deal registration program that their brand vendor has.

Regardless of the reason, having a big sales pipeline does not indicate having good sales results. Quite the opposite, having a big pipeline with long aging days just reflect badly on the salesperson and the organization. Not only does it give a false perception to your management, it also blurs the line of focus on where to spend more or less time on which opportunity.

So start flushing out the unreal ones and start building genuine qualified leads from now on.

"having a big pipeline with long aging days just reflect badly on the salesperson and the organization."

---

If you are having difficulty or simply wants to know more about qualifying opportunities, feel free to reach out to us.

Cherry-O!

#Awareness