During one of our client engagements, a sales leader approached me with a question:

I have a fantastic team. They are doing all of the right things, but we are not delivering great results. What should we do in these circumstances?

We started to peel the onion – there are 3 key parameters for a sales organisation, revenue, pipeline and activity.

They were engaging in a lot of activity, they had enough pipeline but that wasn’t translating into revenue.

We decided, if revenue targets are being missed, let’s take one step back and dive into the pipeline.

We looked at the volume, velocity and quality within the pipeline. We found no problem with the volume but saw challenges on the velocity, and more specifically, the quality of the pipeline.

The qualification rate – that was the problem.

So we asked, what drives the qualification rate?

It is the quality of conversations they were having with CxOs.

At this time, I brought up a framework: 30-3-30, a rule of sales often used in prospecting.

• Are your teams able to get their first thirty seconds with the customer?
• Are those 30 seconds leading to an additional 3 minute conversation?
• Are those 3 minutes compelling enough for the customer to commit to a 30 minute meeting?

On deeper review, we discovered that the first thirty and next three, were not translating into 30 minute meetings with the customer. Therefore, the bottleneck is value perception by the customer. CxOs did not feel the value to continue their interaction with their salespeople.

That was the ‘Aha’ moment.

When you have a sales situation that isn’t hitting the mark, think about:

How could you peel that onion?

How could you distil the root cause?

What are the right questions that will uncover what to focus on?

A person who defends everything, defends nothing.

Within your sales organisation, consider identifying the 3 levers of excellence that can elevate your results and produce exponential sales outcomes.

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