A Sales Leader's Year-End Guide: The Nuts and Bolts of Deal Review
November 07, 2008
From the "Miller Heiman Year-End Guide for Sales Leaders"
The final quarter: It's time for a big push. Salespeople scramble to meet their numbers, and sales leaders expect people on their team to cross the finish line aggressively. To avoid getting into a situation where desperate salespeople jam product (thereby putting at risk the opportunity for long-term relationships with clients), systemize your deal review process.
Past, Present and Future
There are three reasons to embark on a deal review process, according to Rob West, Sales Consultant for Miller Heiman:
• To look backward and reflect on performance versus goals.
• To look at current activity levels from two perspectives.
First, to explore whether the amount of selling activity is sufficient to support sales targets and secondly, to discover to what extent the activities are balanced across the different types of selling work being done (prospecting, qualifying and closing, as examples).
• To look at the forward pipeline or funnel in terms of what's coming down the pike.
While all three categories of funnel review are critical for growth, forward-looking deal review processes help you plan for meeting your sales team's end-of-year forecasts.
The Process: Mandatory Attendance
Deal review process attendance is mandatory for sales leadership because they provide counsel on which deals to pursue, and what resources are appropriate. And, as West comments, "A lot of breakdowns can take place when resource commitments are made without the participation of the people who own the resources."
What happens then? If salespeople come up with strategies without consulting those responsible for resources—marketing or product development, for example—and the resources aren’t available, then it's back to square one.
"Whoever has their hands on the trigger of resources should be involved," West says.
The Process: Two Extremes
Imagine these two scenarios as described by West: One of your account managers has 20 deals in his funnel; another account manager has only three deals in hers. The deal review process will be very different for each example because each manager will have to take different sets of action to accomplish his or her goals.
For the account manager with only three deals, the conversation can focus on understanding the actions required to move each deal through the funnel. On the other hand, the account manager with 20 deals in his funnel needs objective criteria to help him choose where best to spend his efforts.
Editor's Note: Help your team narrow down their sales funnel to bring in optimal year-end success. Read "Critical Steps to Hit Year-end Goals," from the "Miller Heiman Year-End Guide for Sales Leaders," at www.salesandmrketingmanagement.com.
It's Not Just About You: Customer Consequences
A deal that's in the 30-day funnel must be a deal that will close in 30 days, says West. That may seem like common sense, but optimism can lead salespeople to underestimate the amount of time it will take to close a deal. Bottom line: If there are no consequences for the customer, there’s less urgency—and no solid date on which the deal can be won.
Customer consequences can range from compliance to cost-savings to revenue growth. Salespeople operating on year-end deadlines need to realize which deals are imminent—not from a selling perspective, but from the customer's buying perspective. Then, West says, salespeople should focus on deals in which there are consequences, or focus their energy on creating consequences.
"A lot of salespeople fall prey to letting their quota—or the timelines through which the company measures its own financial performance—dictate their sales activity," West says.
Clearly, it's important for salespeople to hit numbers, but they also must respect the customer's own decision-making process.
This article is from the "Miller Heiman Year-End Guide for Sales Leaders," a Miller Heiman Publication. You can download the full guide at www.millerheiman.com. To request a printed copy, please call 877-678-0397.
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