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May 17, 2014
Are Your Reps Focused on the Wrong Opportunities?
By:
You’re half way through May. You missed the Q1 number and Q2 isn’t looking too good. You’re worried. And you should be. Over 60% of sales leaders who trail through Q2 don’t make the number.
There are many possible reasons for missing the number. Here are some of the most common:
Anyone of these can sink the ship. You need to figure out which one is your Achilles heel and solve it. In this blog, I want to concentrate on the last one – focusing your team on the best opportunities.
There are two steps to getting your reps focused on the right opportunities: Identify and Qualify.
Identify the Best Opportunities
The first step to getting your reps focused on the right opportunities is providing them a prioritized list of accounts to call on. The key is prioritization. Too many reps call on 2nd and 3rd tier accounts wasting precious selling time. It’s critical to understand which accounts in your market are going to generate the most revenue over the shortest period of time.
Prioritization is the output of an account segmentation analysis. A well done account segmentation project delivers the following:
Qualify the Opportunities
The next step in the process is teaching your reps to qualify the opportunities. Step #1 delivers a prioritized list, but it’s still just a list. Your team must figure out which account on the list is ‘in the market’ for a new solution or service.
Let’s face it, most buyers are ‘not in the market’. They are happy with the status quo. Or the thought of change is too painful to drive change. This is the selling environment your reps face each day. As such, they need to learn to be world class at qualifying prospects.
There are three tools that will enable your team to qualify opportunities effectively:
Personas, BPMs and Trigger Events enable a rep to diagnose an opportunity quickly. The best reps actively monitor their accounts looking for trigger events. They use social media tools like LinkedIn or Google Alerts to watch for major changes in their buyers’ environment.
Call to Action: If your team is struggling to make the number, they might be focusing efforts on the wrong accounts. You have two quarters to turn things around. Focus your team on the best practice of Identifying and Qualifying opportunities. Download the Opportunity Score Sheet, and get your team back on track.
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