BusinessRhythm

There is a rhythm to business. Understanding that rhythm and working to ensure the proper cadence is critical to growing your sales organization.

Here are three meetings, or conversations, you need to have with your sales team (or yourself) every week.

Pipeline review: his is the foundation of a good cadence. Reviewing the pipeline to inspect how many new opportunities you created in the prior week is the activity that ensures you have the ability to reach your goals. Without the right number of opportunities, you throw your future into doubt. The pipeline meeting also allows you to inspect the overall health of the opportunities in your funnel, ensuring that they are progressing smoothly from target to close. Without this meeting, you will always be surprised, and most of those surprises will not be pleasant.

 Opportunity review: Opportunity reviews allow you to ensure that the opportunity is real, that you can create value for your dream client, and that you have an effective plan to win. Opportunity reviews allow you to focus on strategy. You can ask questions like “What is compelling this prospect to change?” You can also ask questions like “How are we different, and how does that make a difference for this prospective customer?” Most of the time, pipeline reviews end up being opportunity reviews, and these two activities are different and need to be separated. Otherwise, you’ll lose the focus on prospecting that is necessary for a Pipeline Review.

Team huddles: You need to make sure that you are improving from week to week, from month-to-month, from quarter to quarter. Team huddles provide you the format to deal with the challenges that you are having, or that your sales force is having, in a group setting. It’s a way to share best practices, brainstorm on how to overcome common obstacles, and notch your team up by sharing across the entire sales force. These meetings don’t have to be long. But they do have to provide the people involved with actionable insights that will help them do better immediately. It’s a worthwhile investment of time and energy.

I could add more pieces to this cadence, but this is enough to get you started and massively improve your results now. If you are a solo act, you still need to do this work, but you might need an accountability partner to push you.

  • How do you ensure that you are creating the opportunities you need to reach your goals?
  • How do you improve your strategy to ensure you win the opportunities you do create?
  • What do you do to ensure you get better from week to week? (I hope this newsletter is part of that plan)

Comment to send me your thoughts, stories, and ideas. If you know someone who needs this newsletter, forward it to them and ask them to sign up at www.thesalesblog.com/newsletter.

Do good work this week, and I’ll see you back here next week.

Anthony Iannarino

www.iannarino.com

P.S. My friends at TechSmith, makers of Camtasia and Snagit, will give you 10% off a Paid & Professional license of Snagit. Use the code “salesblog” when you sign up. I use it for screen captures, and I like the ability to capture a screen by scrolling.

P.P.S. Today I am beginning the launch plan for my new book, 17 Elements. I am going to invite some folks to join my “street team” to preview the book and help me with the launch. If you are interested in helping with the launch, hit reply and send me a note.

P.P.P.S. Time is running out for you to join me in DC for the Customer Acquisition Symposium on Friday, November 13th, 2015. Sign up here.

 

Contributor Anthony Lannarino is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and consultant. He writes daily at www.thesalesblog.com and you can subscribe to his newsletter at www.thesalesblog.com/newsletter.