As we head into the summer sale season, it's crucial to focus on healthy sales pipeline management. B2B sales can tend to slow or stall during this period due to everyone’s vacations, including your own. This blog focuses on healthy pipelines and the importance of performing a mid-year pipeline checkup. Impatient? You can skip to the action items at the end. Need some advice before 3rd quarter starts? Grab a quick 15-minute chat.
A Checkup is Essential to healthy sales pipeline management
B2B sales are already complex, and navigating summer vacations adds another layer of complexity. You might feel like prospects are ghosting you when they’re just on vacation. To optimize your efforts, it’s important not to bring along dead deals. Focus your precious time and mental energy on serious prospects.
Food for thought: There are 5-10 or more people involved in B2B buying decisions, and there's also you and your team. During June July, and August, most of those people will take off a week or more. How many weeks during those three months will all critical players be in the office at the same time? Winning during this season takes proactive planning.
Your Assignment: Conduct a Pipeline Health Checkup
This is not going to be easy - get very honest with yourself about who is and isn't a prospect. We can go through the basics, but this is complex and it's not easy. If you need a deeper dive, book a quick chat with me for specific actionable insights tailored to your team.
Determine Shoppers from Buyers
Imagine walking into a shopping center, entering a store with a specific intent to buy new running shoes. You might need help finding the right size, or telling the difference between two different models of running shoe, but if they've got it, you're going to buy. Contrast this with browsing without a clear intention to purchase. Maybe you don't need running shoes, but you're curious to see what new styles have come out since you bought your last pair. Maybe you want o get an idea of what you'll buy next when you're ready. You know you're not buying anything that day, but the salesperson sure is excited to see you in their store. It's not always as easy to tell in a more complex B2B sales process.
Serious buyers are those who need something specific and are ready to take action, while shoppers are just looking around. So how do you tell the shopper from the buyer in a B2B sale? They each call you with a desire to learn more, explore pricing, see a demo. You channel your inner 4-year-old and ask questions.
Key Questions to Qualify Prospects:
Do they have a problem that is costing them money, time, clients, or reputation?
Is it a problem that you can solve?
Can you solve it better than their current solution?
Do they care about the problem?
Do they have the resources to address the problem?
Do you understand their buying timeline and decision-making process?
Is your next follow-up scheduled on your calendar? And theirs?
Laying some tough love on you - if you can't answer yes to all of those, chances are you're not winning that deal.
Pro Tip: Most CRMs have AI features included. If you use the system and its features, ensuring that your activities are logged appropriately and you've added your notes, the CRM can assist you in determining who's likely to buy.. Your most important superpower as a B2B Sales professional is your sales gut. Always review the information produced by AI and reach your own conclusion. We're also publishing a blog series on maximizing productivity by using AI in B2B sales, check out the intro post here.
Action Steps:
Evaluate each active prospect in your pipeline:
Determine if they meet the criteria above.
Disqualify or deprioritize those who don’t pass the test.
When you disqualify or deprioritize prospects, it's very scary. But here's the thing. You only have so many hours in each day, ask yourself why you're wasting your time on people are aren't ever going to buy or at least aren't in a buying mood now. Send those deals back to marketing for nurturing.
Success Story:
I once worked with a client who went through this exercise. Each salesperson was very nervous about the size of their pipeline when we were done with the review. Two things happened - they conducted 80% fewer demos, and beat their prior year's sales. And here's the kicker - the following year they sold double without adding more salespeople. Anxiety over the smaller pipeline led the salespeople to prospect more.
Need Help?
Need help? I've got some coaching exercises that go through this work. A lot of empathy needs to be layered in with the tough love, so I prefer to do the pipeline health checkup live. Book a quick chat to see if I might be able to help you and your team.
What's Next
Next week we will cover strategies and tactics for following up with the deals you deprioritized. You won't want to miss that one! Subscribe so you don't miss anything. Share with anyone you know who's in B2B sales, we can all use all the help we can get.
Rise of Us is a practice run by Summer Poletti, specializing in revenue growth: sales, strategic partnerships, customer success, marketing alignment. We generally work with financial services and SaaS companies from $2MM - $20MM ARR and help them plan and execute for their next stage of revenue growth. We concentrate on strategy, coaching, and organizational alignment.
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