The Sales Clot

Are your prospective sales getting stuck in the sales cycle?

This article has to do with your lead flow and how well you manage it. What’s a lead flow you ask? It is how a lead, or new suspect/prospect, flows through your company; from marketing to telesales to outside sales to customer service to support and so on. Actually, your Sales Process (you DO have a Sales Process, don’t you?!) helps define this flow as well as the relationships between all departments and/or individuals who touch the lead during the sales cycle – pre, during and post sale. What I’m going to focus on here is how sales professionals can avoid having their leads stuck somewhere in this process because they have a Sales Clot – or something that keeps the lead from progressing in the right direction, or for that matter, in any direction. A Sales Clot is typically caused by not having a definition for the different categories of leads and having no description of how to handle or dispense with leads depending on the categories they’re in. Hence, the lead gets stuck somewhere in the process like a zombie floating around your business indefinitely, confusing your forecasts and wasting resources.

Sales people just hate to drop a prospect who displays any semblance of interest whatsoever. They will chase a lead until one of them, the prospect or the sales rep, wins or dies trying. Naturally, this can cause a tremendous waste of time and resources, not just for the sales rep but for other individuals and departments within his organization. If your sales process involves moving to a point where a proposal needs to be generated, for instance, then chances are that a proposal generating team gets involved to help in that effort. Or say at one point in the sales process executive management needs to get involved by meeting with the prospect. Or, a home-office visit is required to promote your company’s credibility. In all these cases, and more, these resources could be wasted on leads that are not qualified or are prematurely engaged when their involvement should be requested further down the sales process. The result is that the lead gets stuck somewhere in the sales process in an undefined, or wrongly defined, category. And they can remain there indefinitely messing up your forecasts, using up resources and competing with your time that’s needed for working with more qualified leads. To avoid such situations, you need to “ATE” your leads... Read More

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