Have your processes grown stale?

We've all been there haven't we? That stage where we become perfectly comfortable in routine and close our minds to any other way of thinking. It almost becomes a bit like a superstition. I am not superstitious by nature but it pains me to admit I once went through a spell where I wouldn't walk onto a football pitch without listening to Chumbawamba's 'I get knocked down.' For some reason that went over the head of all therapy groups attended, I truly believed I couldn't possibly kick a football until I'd been graced by the presence of such an outrageously ghastly song.

Qualification and discovery in sales is just as valuable to you as it is the customer

Some things just aren't meant to be

I often talk about the value in finding out about your customers needs and pains so that your product can fit with the customers problems. What I don't often mention is how valuable it is to make sure the customer fits you as a product. Whilst qualifying and researching sales leads to prove our worth is important, it also assists to identify whether or not you're on a hiding to nothing, distracted by the whiff of a sale.

Whether we like to believe it or not, some deals are simply not worth pursuing and stopping them early enough to save time and money is a necessity. Often these deals are left to drag causing both sides a lot of discomfort when ultimately each camp knows the relationship is going nowhere. It's a bit like being set up on a blind date with someone you have nothing in common with. The sensible thing to do would be to part ways as soon as you realised. Most though, will hang around for the duration of the evening until it reaches a respectable time to go home.

The deal might even have looked promising at the start, but then a trigger may have altered the situation. A sponsor may have left, new vision put in place. Yes, trigger events are fantastic for knowing what your customer wants, but the point here is that they are equally good for identifying bad deals before it's too late. As long as you're taking the time to monitor prospects, you're the one dictating the action. That's the position you want to find yourself in.

Where is your sales organisation heading?

Most people assume that installing a CRM system will solve all sales performance issues, in a similar way to most men assuming that buying a flat pack wardrobe means you instantly have a brand new, wonderful looking wardrobe. Anyone who has sat with an Allen key, a piece of wood that simply doesn't make logistical sense, and a sense of self pity will know this simply isn't the case.

The problem is, there is a lot of useful data to take in and as an expert on the subject suggests, CRM systems "treat their own data like an island. Useful sales analytics can only typically come from bringing together information from Sales, Marketing and Finance systems." The fact that they don't combine effectively means analysing your sales performance can actually be much more challenging.

Of course, the emergence of systems like Salesforce mean we can track more data than ever before but if you were to ask a sales manager if he knew which sales tactics were working best, or which customers are proving more profitable using just a CRM system alone, he'd probably struggle to start the sentence without the line 'probably this' or 'probably that'.

There is now a free assessment online for sales leaders to assess themselves relative to their peer groups across a carefully selected set of sales performance metrics. It's a really useful ten minutes worth of time so I'd recommend giving it a go. You'll probably be more than a little bit interested in the results too...

Take the assessment