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October 6, 2017
Sales Leaders Can Close Big Deals in Q4 by Reducing Customer Risk
By: Scott Gruher
According to your sales reps, the pipeline is full of deals. You need to close a few of the late stage big ones to make your number this year.
How do you know if these late stage deals will close in Q4?
This blog will focus on five ways to reduce the perception of risk associated with your solution.
Q4 is difficult. The holidays are an obstacle to getting face time with prospects and customers to secure those last minute deals. Get ahead of this issue, by building a Q4 strategy now.
Early stage sales activity won’t get you to the number. Neither will your efforts to move deals from stage 1 to stage 2 in the sales process. These are important activities, but they won’t impact the number in Q4. It is too late. Save those early stage deals for your 2018 strategy planning. SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018 will help you with that.
The deals you care about for Q4 are the ones in the latter half of the sales cycle. Listen in on the win strategy sessions for these deals. This is what you hear from the team:
Chances are that these deals won’t close this year unless you change the game.
Why are reps overly optimistic?
During the first 3 stages of the sales process interactions are primarily positive. The rep is focused on what the customer wants. Once you reach the later stages, the rep typically starts asking the customer to commit to change. This is where things get difficult. Customers start to worry about risk. What if this fails and my name is tied to it? How do I know they can pull it off? Things slow down or stall. Your contact vaporizes.
Try this
Flip the funnel. Get laser focused on moving late stage deals to the finish line. Poor and average reps focus on pitching their product and provide an unbelievable ROI. They avoid tough conversations. Top performers look for ways to help make it easy for buyers to buy. They address the risk that is undoubtedly in the buyers’ minds.
5 Ways to Address Risk
Click here to download a copy of the Sales Risk Assessment Tool shown below.
This tool helps you do the following:
Call to Action:
Don’t hope that late stage deals will close in time for you to make the number. Take what top performers do to progress deals and spread it across your sales team.
Have expectations gone up and left you wondering if you can make your number? Here is a tool that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate yourself against SBI’s sales and marketing strategy to find out if:
Scott joined SBI in 2010 with years of hands-on experience in sales leadership and enterprise selling. Since his arrival, he has helped dozens of organizations dramatically accelerate growth, from Fortune 10 organizations like Phillips 66 to fast-growing cloud service organizations like InfusionSoft. Scott specializes in cross-functional alignment. He helps leaders align around the growth goal and design the right processes to bring the strategy to life. His unique combination of real world experience and a pragmatic approach to problem solving have made him one of SBI’s most demanded resources.
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