Throughout my entire career, there has been one unrelenting mantra that remains unquestioned gospel from the mouths of every sales leader to the ears of every dutiful salesperson: “You need to keep 3 times your annual quota in your sales pipeline”
If someone doesn’t spend enough time prospecting due to poor time management – it’s really a priority problem.
We don’t find the time, we make it.
When qualifying sales leads, the first lens to look through is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). We discover whether potential prospects are the right size, in the right industry, and are located in the right geographical location. We might also have additional qualifying information, such as marketing data, like digital footprints from websites, and white papers they downloaded.
Channel partners provide a way for companies to not only bring their products to market, but to develop long-term profitable relationships that are beneficial to the maker, the seller, and the buyer. But we still have a long way to go to truly unwrap the potential of co-selling relationships with channel partners.
I’ve been writing a series of posts about selling basics. Too often, we take for granted that people understand these. We toss the words around, assuming people understand what we are talking about, what it means, and how it works. In reality, people don’t understand. The link to the series is here. I’ll be adding more over the coming weeks.
Recently, a reader wrote, asking a lot of questions about pipelines–what are they, why are they important, how do we leverage them, and so forth. At first, I was surprised by the question, I think of this as basic and fundamental to selling. As I reflected, I realized this is a bad assumption.
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