Building sales pipeline momentum in a hybrid world

Building sales pipeline momentum in a hybrid world.

5 key building blocks for anyone tasked with growing sales.

I spent some time coaching a small sales team who had the motto ‘Get sh*t done’ on the holding screen for their daily catch ups. Not one of them knew what it meant beyond doing more of what they always did; more outbound mails, more cold calls, more sequences, more LinkedIn posts. More everything and everything faster.

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Cocooned in their remote workspaces busy, tired, and frantic, they had some success. But they couldn't celebrate because there was no definition for what good looked like much less a plan for how they might get there or any measures in place to show where they were on their quest. 

Working remotely was still a privilege met with suspicion especially when it became normalised under the cloud of Covid and lockdown and no longer needed to be justified. Although sales teams had traditionally been remote and hybrid in nature this was different because now all stakeholders, including customers, were remote too. It was suddenly much, much, harder to get things done as part of a sales campaign. As time moved on growing numbers of people now work remotely either by corporate design or as a career choice.

That the world of work has moved on is no longer a debate, but I still hear from many people that visiting clients is no longer commonplace and we continue to wrestle with how to get the right people together in one place at one time to make it worth doing at all. How then do we go about being disciplined in some of the less glamorous aspects of growing sales.

To find prospects and turn them into happy, revenue generating, repeat customers a prospecting plan is needed. A plan to articulate the specifics of what to get done to engage, inform, coach, and provoke qualified prospects, a plan for the messaging and materials needed to maintain a dialogue, and a plan for reviewing progress against agreed metrics. For many salespeople or business owners this was kryptonite but a well thought through plan was always the ticket to being trusted to deliver. 

In practical terms, the plan must set out the targets, activities, and engagement strategies to deliver the necessary contribution to the business plan. Running excitedly from one day to the next is not going to work for long whether the role is part of a corporate sales team or a small business owner for whom sales is one of many hats to be worn.

A prospecting plan needn’t be complicated. Here are 5 key building blocks for anyone tasked with building sales momentum...

1. Ideal Prospect Profile

A clear understanding of the ideal prospect should be at the core of prospecting activity. The profile may vary by market or vertical, but a lot of time, effort and resources will be burned on inbound and outbound activity, so it makes sense to be clear about the profile of the ideal prospect.

There are many readily available templates for the profile. They can be populated from existing knowledge or fresh, external, eyes can be retained to create new materials.

The Ideal Prospect Profile has 4 primary functions...

• Align all prospecting efforts to a commonly agreed target profile  
• Make a clear distinction between a lead and a prospect
• Begin to define qualification questions, materials and campaigns aligned to the business and operational challenges of the ideal prospect

The more closely the business aligns itself to the ideal prospect the greater the opportunity to be regarded as distinctive in its engagements.

2. Intelligent milestones

There’s no getting away from it, performance should be measured, reported and reviewed. The prospecting plan needs to set out both leading and lagging performance indicators. This is probably easier in a team environment where there are readily accessible comparators but even a micro business should establish measures to prioritise and learn from.

Leading indicators focus on clearly recognised factors of future success such as time spent on specific activities, responses to outbound initiatives or completion of significant events such as ‘proposals sent’. In effect, leading indicators look at the road ahead.

Lagging indicators describe the results that have been achieved and could include sales status, number of deals closed, profit margins, or average deal sizes. They tell us what has already happened. 

Neither the plan nor the performance tracking needs to be complicated. Most organisations will have preferred platforms, apps or templates but for smaller or start-up businesses a ‘free’ CRM or spreadsheet could be enough to get started until you are confident you have volume and the approach is robust enough to justify an upgrade.

3. Build campaigns

As a great sales VP of mine once told me, ‘You need two eyes on this quarter and one on next’. He wasn’t wrong.

The campaigns themselves could be generic and themed to a product launch or an industry issue, seasonal or based around industry events. They could involve promotions, speaking opportunities, social media or personalised outbound campaigns.

Salespeople prefer spending time on selling activities that are closer to the end of the sales process than the beginning and will happily fuel debates about the quality of inbound leads. Campaigns should support, not replace, time each day or week the salesperson dedicates to outbound prospecting.

4. Messaging and tools

Prospecting with clear and focused messages helps salespeople attract, engage and nurture ideal prospects. The tools they build, such as case studies, success stories, scripts and playbooks, should adapt fluently to the business or operational goals of key individual prospect stakeholders.

Consideration should also be given to the ease with which an ideal prospect can navigate the company web site. What will they be looking for and what will they find when they get there?

The prospecting plan should identify the tools that are needed and the actions to be taken to address any gaps. The salesperson must understand how to use the tools and resources to elegantly introduce insightful questions that create an opportunity to both confirm and influence the thinking of buyers and decision makers. 

5. Measure, review and refine

The prospecting plan should include regular formal and informal review points, including standing Sales meetings. Making them part of the plan encourages the salesperson to engage as a peer and take responsibility for their prospecting plan, rather than being summoned to a management inspection.

This is harder to do if you are a small business working from your garden office! Consider hiring an external contributor to participate in a review of progress and expose yourself to challenge and debate.

A review of the prospecting plan should include:

• Progress against agreed Leading and Lagging performance indicators
• Feedback and lessons learned from a review of wins, losses and stuck deals
• Ideas and actions to adapt and positively influence performance

The theme here is to inspect what is important and what was expected and use the findings to agree the next prospecting actions. 

Successful salespeople will take a pro-active ‘rolling thunder’ approach to communicating performance updates allowing themes and ideas to develop and focus to be maintained. Underperforming salespeople are more likely to adopt an irregular ‘lightning strike’ approach which can be disruptive and, often, arrive too late to influence progress.

Margin notes...

The world of sales is awash with ideas and opinions, templates and hacks. Don’t be consumed by stories of people ‘crushing it’! Lessons can be learned from everyone’s experiences, but the reality is that prospecting is hard work and requires thought and planning.

Make a prospecting plan, version 1, and focus on actions and outcomes. Get the best brains involved to road test assumptions and ideas. Review progress against expectations at regular intervals to understand what can be improved.

(Adapted from an article posted on Medium).