Fix Your Pipeline - Metrics that Matter
In Part 3, we’re focusing on metrics that matter. Learn how to track progress — not motion — and use data to accelerate real performance.
Check out all four parts of the Fix Your Pipeline series:
1. Pipeline Clarity
2. Consistency Wins
3. Metrics that Matter
4. Honest Forecasting
For more strategies like this, check out my sales tip video library on YouTube...
If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:
I hope you are enjoying this four part series on improving your pipeline metrics. Today, number three, I want to talk about the length of time it takes to close a deal. So if you've identified as we asked you to do that, you're taking way too long to close a deal. Then here are some things that you could work on in order to improve that one.
More people from your organization into the opportunity. New set of eyes A different perspective does three things to help you speed up the sale.
One, it points out your pinch points, your weak spots, and also the opportunities that you can leverage that you may be missing. Two it increases the likelihood that your customer will bring more people to the table because they don't want to meet with five of you if that's who's showing up. So they will bring more people and potentially more decision makers to the room. And three, you make them feel supported. You make them feel loved. You make them feel like you really care about them. And when they feel that way emotionally, they're more likely to buy from you.
So bring more people in. Number two thought of like we talked about last time.
Make sure you're asking for the sale.
It's critically important if you're going to win the business quickly that you're actually asking for the business. Number three, map out a process by which the customer agrees all the steps that need to happen in order for you to move this from where it is to where you're going to close, and set deadlines. If there are certain steps that need to happen, you have to get them a proposal. They have to get you an NDA. You have to get them a product sheet. They have to get you an equipment list.
You have to get your manager involved. They have to introduce you to legal whatever those steps are.
Map them all out and put deadlines on them that you promise to have your deadlines met by a certain date, and they promise as well. That way you can hold them accountable as things start to slip. Most deals slip because salespeople don't create urgency.
We need to create urgency using their own timeline. And if we can get the customer to agree that they will have information or people or a decision or signatures to you by a certain date, and we can hold our customers accountable to that and speed up the likelihood of the sale. I wrote about this extensively in Nonstop Salespeople, and there are also articles on our website about creating a closing map or a decision map. And I would encourage you to read those pages in that chapter in the book, because it maps out exactly the language that you can use in order to set a deadline that the customer agrees to, and use that customer deadline as the urgency that you need to shorten the sales cycle.