A healthy sales pipeline is always flowing. This is from figuring out how to tap into your market and getting an audience that pays attention. It means you have a process that works.
Now if you are experiencing stops and starts or discontinuity in your selling, it may be because your process relies too much on talent and less on systems. If new leads only get driven from the engagement of only a few salespeople then you might find that continuity is hard to achieve. People are very low leverage in sales. They can only get to one person at a time in sequence.
There is a lot of work to keep a sales pipeline flowing that one person often cannot fulfill well. So, a better strategy is to look at an inside out approach. On the inside, you can have team members that fulfill a consistent touch process and follow up with leads.
On the outside, you can have salespeople meeting customers, presenting your company’s products and closing deals.
Team selling is not anything new, but sometimes, it’s hard to transition if you rely on and are used to talent too much. Your process will hit a glass ceiling by the nature of your flow.
And in today’s inattentive economy, people are not waiting around to get followed up with. Responsiveness is a largely competitive attribute and organizations that have figured out how to line up their people and systems to fulfill the attention demand keep activity and opportunities flowing.
So, if you took a look at what is bottlenecking your sales, how could you break up the activities to win? Adding more people is not necessarily the answer. Lining up an inside out approach will allow you to leverage specialties and keep things continuous.
