The Importance of Your Pipeline Report

Keeping an accurate pipeline report is more important than you might think. Imagine this: you’re watching TV on a Sunday night and check your email. You have one from the VP of Sales that says, “Sam – I have to give a report to our CEO tomorrow morning on our market activity. Is this an accurate representation of your pipeline over 50%?” And below the message is a copy-paste of your pipeline report. How would you answer that question? This actually happened to me. And fortunately, my answer was “Yes”. Not everybody had the same answer.

Your sales management may be harping on you about your pipeline report, always nagging you to keep it current. Or, they may be on your back about utilizing the CRM tool. Whatever the case, they have good reason. And so do you. Your pipeline report is not only a critical component for the organization to make important business decisions; you are also creating your internal brand with your pipeline.

Blog continued below

Would you spend $3.99 to get a big deal un-stuck? Seems like a silly question – who wouldn’t. Well, I have developed a killer email that gets deals unstuck and it works so well that I wrote a book about it. And, I have also included two other emails to help you as well. It’s a short book – 22 pages printed – and it will take you about ten minutes to read. The ideas in the book are simple – almost silly. But you’ll be pleasantly surprised if not shocked with the results.

The book is available at just about every electronic outlet, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Kobo. It’s also available for your iPad at the iTunes store.

No eReader? No problem! Click HERE to download and print the book in any format you want.

Like it or not, the organization relies on your pipeline report for very important planning purposes. If you work in a manufacturing organization, your pipeline report might be used to order expensive inventory – or not. What happens when your pipeline report doesn’t accurately reflect your potential sales? Inventory levels are too high or too low. Either way your company suffers financially.

Nearly every business makes the rolled-up forecast an important part of the financial planning process. How many people can we hire? How many new reps? Or worse, do we need to reduce staff in light of slower sales? Keeping an accurate and up-to-date pipeline helps make these critical decisions.

If you work for a public company the CEO and his/her team are relying on the pipeline report to let investors know what to expect in the coming quarter(s). If your pipeline report is inaccurate it could affect your stock price and your CEO’s credibility on the street.

And your pipeline report is a reflection of your personal brand in several ways. First, is it up to date? Do you have all of your deals in the pipeline report, or are large and important deals missing? If not, it is a poor reflection of your organizational skills. No seller really likes to keep their pipeline report accurate. You are no exception. But it is something that needs to be done, so how you reflect that in an accurate and up to date report is a reflection on how the team can trust you.

Second, are the close dates and close percentages accurate and meaningful? Do you show a large deal about to close with a sales stage of “Discovery”? If so, you either have an incredibly short sales cycle, or the deal is inaccurately portrayed in your pipeline. Fix that. Get real about the dates and the sales stage. This kind of pipeline hygiene is important for your brand and reflects poorly on you of it is inaccurate. Again, important decisions are being made with this information.

Third, is there enough pipeline in your report? Do you have enough sales activity against your plan objectives? This is another reflection of your brand and perhaps the most important. All too often I have seen non-performing reps padding their pipeline reports with nonsense deals. I can ask about three questions and off comes the opportunity. Or, reps keep their “pet” opportunities on the pipeline reports for months or even years. Again, this is an easy to spot sign that you don’t have enough sales activity. Take a good, objective look at your pipeline and compare it against your sales goals. Is there enough? If you’re not sure how to tell, refer to my prior article, “How Much Pipeline is Enough”.

Managing pipeline and your CRM is a pain in the a$$. But the consequences for not keeping them up to date can have dire consequences for your company and you. Spend the time to make things an accurate reflection of you and your activity. You never know when you’ll get an email from an executive on a Sunday night!

Meetings Dos and Don'ts

I’ve been in a lot of meetings over the last several years. I’ve had the chance to present and be presented-to. I’ve watched dozens of reps in action and been really proud – and really embarrassed. I’ve walked out of meetings a hero and others a heel. There’s not much that I haven’t seen or said.

So, here is a list of Do’s and Don’ts that you should follow when meeting with prospects and customers. I have not consistently done all of the “Dos” and have probably violated all of the “Don’ts”. But you should keep these in mind as you meet with prospects. If you do then you’ll win their hearts more often than you’ll lose them.

In no particular order:

Do: Always start the meeting with a question – or have them state/re-state their problem.

Don’t: Hand out a package at the beginning of the meeting. It’ll give them an excuse to ignore you while you speak.

Do: Have an authentic conversation.

Don’t: Bore them to death with the “show up and throw up” PowerPoint presentation.

Blog continued below

Would you spend $3.99 to get a big deal un-stuck? Seems like a silly question – who wouldn’t. Well, I have developed a killer email that gets deals unstuck and it works so well that I wrote a book about it. And, I have also included two other emails to help you as well. It’s a short book – 22 pages printed – and it will take you about ten minutes to read. The ideas in the book are simple – almost silly. But you’ll be pleasantly surprised if not shocked with the results.

The book is available at just about every electronic outlet, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Kobo. It’s also available for your iPad at the iTunes store.

No eReader? No problem! Click HERE to download and print the book in any format you want.

Do: Follow up within 24 hours. This is not like dating. They need to hear from you right away.

Don’t: Set your backpack or briefcase on the conference table. Put it on the floor behind you.

Do: Leave your phone in the car or turn it off. Vibrate won’t cut it. You can still hear it.

Don’t: Interrupt them. Ever.

Do: Use the dry erase board and tell your story.

Don’t: Show up unprepared. Know everything you can about them. Never say, “So, tell me a little about your company.”

Do: Thank them for taking time to meet with you.

Don’t: Be late. If you looks like you will be late, make sure to call them and let them know.

Do: Arrive 10-minutes early.

Don’t: Accept their invitation for coffee. Too easy to spill on you, your materials, or them.

Do: Take notes, but ask them if it’s okay first. Really simply, “Do you mind if I jot down a few notes while we speak?”

Don’t: Yammer on and on about your children.

Do: Keep the meeting on task, respecting their time and yours.

Don’t: Get visibly upset when something goes wrong or a key person misses the meeting.

Do: Go in knowing what they want to talk about. Use the email(s) in my book for this.

Don’t: Ask, “So what are the next steps?”

Do: Suggest next steps.

Don’t: Ever mention your competitors by name if they say, “So, who are your key competitors?” Selling is hard enough without giving them other companies to speak to.

Do: Acknowledge that you have good competitors, but “…nobody does exactly what we do.”

Don’t: Leave yourself stranded if you need Internet access and they don’t have it. Have a Plan-B.

Do: Use humor and be authentic.

Don’t: Assume that they agree with your social and/or political views.

These are just a few. If you have others, please let me know by commenting, or shooting me an email at lorimers@sbcglobal.net.

An Amazing Source for FREE Company Information

In a prior post I wrote about the importance of creating a territory plan. The idea is to come up with a list of prospects to call on based on researching your prior success and mapping that success in your territory. To read the article click HERE. Now that you have a list of prospects, and hopefully some existing accounts to work, it’s time to create some account plans. If you call on very small accounts and have a high churn rate, this is necessary for your success too. You just won’t have as much data to work with. The specific data that I’m talking about today is for publicly traded companies.

There is a goldmine of free information available that every seller can leverage. It’s online at www.sec.gov. I was taking advantage of this kind of information in my first year out of college well before the Internet. My job was to perform competitive analysis and I spent hours in the public library pulling company filings and creating metrics to help our organization compare itself to our competitors. No more driving to the library now. It’s all online.

Blog continued below

Would you spend $3.99 to get a big deal un-stuck? Seems like a silly question – who wouldn’t. Well, I have developed a killer email that gets deals unstuck and it works so well that I wrote a book about it. And, I have also included two other emails to help you as well. It’s a short book – 22 pages printed – and it will take you about ten minutes to read. The ideas in the book are simple – almost silly. But you’ll be pleasantly surprised if not shocked with the results.

The book is available at just about every electronic outlet, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Kobo. It’s also available for your iPad at the iTunes store.

No eReader? No problem! Click HERE to download and print the book in any format you want.

The challenge is that there are dozens of filings and some have more useful information than others. Here is a step-by-step process to find relevant information online:

Go to www.sec.gov

Under “Filings and Forms”, Click on “Search for Company Filings”.

On the next page, click on “Company or fund name, ticker symbol, CIK (Central Index Key), file number, state, country, or SIC (Standard Industrial Classification)

Pick a company to start your research. If you can't come up with one, try "ALL" for Allstate Insurance.

Once you enter the ticker symbol you will be presented with dozens of reports. Only a few of these are relevant for your research and are full of great information.

The first is the 10-Q. The 10-Q is the quarterly report that every public company must submit and it contains important financial and company direction information. Here you will find the most recent income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. You don’t need to have a CPA to understand if sales are down or profits are up. What you are looking for here are trends that indicate how the company is performing. There are also sections that explain the company performance in great detail, who their major customers are, what companies they have acquired, and other major developments that impact their overall performance. There is also some very sophisticated financial disclosure information that some sellers will find important while others won’t. Pick and choose the information that is relevant for your selling situation.

The next is the 10-K. This is the annual report, detailing the financial results for the year. This report contains much of the same information contained in the 10-Q but is based on annual figures where the 10-Q is based on quarterly figures. If you want the most recent information, use the 10-Q. The 10-K is typically more detailed since it covers an entire year.

An important part of the 10-K is how individual divisions within the organization are performing. This is particularly important for the very large companies that are a federation of separate operating organizations. You are likely to have much more success calling on an operating division than you are calling on the company headquarters. Pick the operating division that is more likely to purchase from you, and drill down on their performance. Are they growing? Have the acquired a competitor? What are their key business drivers? Most of this information can be found in the 10-K.

DEF 14A is the next filing to pay attention to. This is the filing with information on the executive team and the board of directors (BOD). This could be important to you for a couple of reasons. First, an executive from your organization may serve on the other company’s BOD. If that is the case, you may be able to leverage that relationship. Conversely you may be barred from conducting business with the organization due to a conflict of interest issue. More than likely, you can leverage the relationship.

Second, if you are selling at the executive level, you can not only find out about board members, who they are, what they earn, their stock and cash incentive plans, where they went to school, if they serve on other boards and what philanthropic organizations participate in. But you can also find information on executive team members. Here the information is more in-depth than on the company website. This kind of intelligence can be very helpful for you when trying to contact these people and making the right kind of connections with them.

There is a wealth of information available at the SEC website. If you aren’t leveraging this amazing and FREE resource – you should!

The Best of 2011

Happy New Year to you, and thanks for your readership! I hope that 2011 was a great year for you and that 2012 will be even better.

Many thousands of readers from all over the world stopped by to read my blog last year. Here are the top three articles from 2011 by readership:

#3: The #1 Meeting Mistake I recently ran across a great discussion on LinkedIn that started with the question, “What's the # 1 Meeting Mistake Average Sales People Make? “ I chimed in about the need to prepare well, and of course referenced the chapter in my book that specifically addresses the topic. But there was another response that was so spot-on and so compelling that I asked the author if I could include it in my blog. She was happy to oblige. Here is Eileen Kent’s take on the #1 meeting mistake that average sales people make.

#2: Selling Around/Over Your Contact You have established a great relationship with your customer and have been calling on the same person for a long time. They have been a good and loyal customer. You know that there is more that you can do for them, but your main contact has always stonewalled your requests for meeting with his boss. Now you find out that there may be legitimate threats to the business from a feared competitor. You’ve grown comfortable in your relationship and now find you have zero leverage (or so it seems) to go above him. The boss is pressuring you to “sell higher” in the organization. How do you make that happen? How do you “go around” your contact and get the meeting?

#1: Set More Appointments with Decision Makers A few years ago I was chatting with a very well respected VP of Sales at a software company in Chicago. One of the things he shared with me was that his company had a process for setting appointments that constantly kept their sales reps in front of new prospects. He admitted that he had challenges in other areas of the sales process, but setting appointments was not one of them. They had more appointments than they knew what to do with. He shared his appointment setting process with me and I immediately put it to work with my sales team and the results were amazing. If setting appointments is one of your sales responsibilities and you want to set more, read on.

Many of you found those articles by way of a Google search result. But you may have missed some nuggets in other articles. So, here are my favorite articles from 2011:

The Power of Silence and the Pregnant Pause I had a big scare at the Houston airport last week. But it had nothing to do with travel. I was there with one of my sales reps and he walked up to me with a big grin and said, “I just did a Sam.”

Pick Up the Damn Phone! I love email. I love it so much that I even wrote a book about three go-to emails that have had a dramatic impact on my personal production. The problem is we tend to rely too much on email and over time it has become a crutch.

On Being Authentic I was having dinner with a new sales rep recently and she asked me “What’s the most important thing I need to know in order to be successful in sales?” I wasn’t ready for this question and I had to pause for a minute to think about it. The typical answers raced through my mind; work hard, listen, build good relationships, etc. But this rep was new to selling, having come from the industry, so my answer had to be a really good one. And then it struck me, “Always be authentic.”

And, of course the main driver behind blogging is to support sales of my first book, Click “Send” and Sell. Three Unconventional Emails with Extraordinary Sales Results. I’m pleased to report that sales were brisk and that all reviews were very positive. If you haven’t checked out the book, it’s a great tool to have to help your sales in 2012. The book is available at just about every electronic outlet, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Kobo. It’s also available for your iPad at the iTunes store. If you don’t have an eReader, click HERE to download and print the book in any format you want.

Look for more common sense articles in 2012!