If every salesperson were equally experienced and adept at assessing
the quality of their pursuits, there would be no such thing as “Happy
Ears”. After hours, days, and
weeks of prospecting some suspect finally says: “maybe”. Oddly, the salesperson, in spite of
extensive rejection, is the most optimistic person in a company. A “maybe” sounds a lot like a “yes” and
our salesperson is on the attack like a hound after a hare. As experience has shown, some “maybe’s”
are indeed future orders; some are “tire kicker” requests; and some no more
than opportunities to provide free consulting to keep a buyer-selected
competitor honest during negotiations.
For 90% of salespeople, a “maybe” is an opportunity to do what they most
enjoy: selling; and do less of what they don’t: prospecting. Combine that with a generally buoyant
nature and the result is exaggerated expectations about deal size, probability
of close, and the buying decision process, including decision date. If the cost of opportunity pursuit were
zero, then we might be indifferent.
Quite to the contrary, the cost of pursuit can be very high both in
accounting (proposals, trips to the prospect, marshalling experts) and economic
costs (lost selling time, lost time of experts, revenue not pursued). For these very reasons, organizations
rely on the objective and skilled opportunity assessment of sales
managers. Assessment leads to a
go/no-go decision to pursue and to the development of an attack plan. The sales manager is central to the
coordination of that plan. The
allocation of finite resources to opportunities that have the highest probability
of closing is one of the most important jobs in a company and one of the top
responsibilities of the Sales Manager.
But what happens in most
organizations? Here is a sample of
comments we have heard from executives:
Managers need to inspect in a common manner. Everyone does it differently so results
are across the board.
Opportunity assessment and management is done via
brute force.
Because we have weak pipelines managers allow
sellers to chase anything and everything.
Our forecasts are inaccurate because opportunities
we were counting on go into the loss column or experience significant delay.
We end up blaming our products for losses on
opportunities we never had a chance to win.
(A VP of
Sales referring to one of his sellers) That dog can’t hunt.
We don’t
effectively sell our low-end products.
How will we make the jump to selling solutions? It’ll be like jumping to hyperspace.
