“There is no such thing as a no-sale call. A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is who is gonna close? You or him? Now be relentless.”
I recently had a conversation with the sales operations team of a large multinational organization. They reached out to discuss the development of value propositions for use by their sellers. Despite their stated objective, within minutes, we were discussing performance-enhancing sales technology. Their follow-up phone call and questions had nothing to do with selling skills and value propositions but everything to do with sales analytics and technology. This experience, repeated over and again, demonstrates the importance sales executives, leaders, and support personnel place on technology as a means to elevate sales performance.
CRMs are a fantastic technology that helps manage sales teams and sales funnels. What many sales team leaders don’t realize is that CRMs are only as good as the data that’s in them.
Record the wrong data points and your CRM will misrepresent the truth of your sales pipeline.
If you’re recording activity only, you can never know whether those cases are fake data. The following risk being fake data:
With just these numbers, you can never know whether the data is old and dead or a true representation of what is happening. Making decisions with this information will lead to inaccurate and inflated forecasts and sales goals.
The way you take control of your sales pipeline and start setting the right goals for your sales team is by focusing your record keeping on a KPI that tracks movement: The Schedule Next Event Play
The Schedule Next Event Play involves four steps that take place at the end of each action or meeting in your sales process.
Make sure that the time, date, and location are all certain at the end of the meeting.
Scheduling the next event prevents you from recording fake data by shifting your focus towards up-and-coming actions rather than actions that have already happened.
“Because we’re switching the focus from backward activity to forward momentum, now we know how things are truly processing in the sales pipeline.” – Cameron Baird, Griffin Hill COO
Read our eBook to learn more about how you can apply these principles. We’ll also give you access to some tech tools that will help you keep track of real data and get rid of the fake data bogging you down.
Discover how to revolutionize your pipeline.