How has been the new quarter starting weeks for you? Is your lead pipeline in place? How are you looking at incorporating some of the learnings of last quarter? Do you have some massive external factors in favour or against you this quarter?
Having some of these questions addressed early in the quarter gives you a great direction and guides you to focus on segments and deals where you will get maximum conversions. We have further highlighted here 5 early to-dos to have a great sales quarter.
1. Prioritise and close the deals which had high propensity but didn’t convert in the last quarter
A good encouraging start is a must for your own and your team’s confidence and that creates amazing energy in the team for the next set of months. Make sure if you close a few deals early in the quarter and spread this energy sooner than later.
Best opportunities lie in the last quarter funnel where you can dig out prospects who were close to converting, but some reason or the other didn’t close. Revisit their discussions, identify their needs and find a few who can be approached for closure now.
You may also look at what is new in the current quarter in your product or service layer which can help attract those prospects and then tailor your sales pitch accordingly.
2. Adjust your lead pipeline as per learnings of the last quarter
Your lead quality is the first and ultimately one of the biggest factors in helping you achieve your targets. Every new quarter is a good opportunity to take a pause, assess the lost leads, and identify the major reasons why you lost them.
The ones related to lead profile and source of leads are the ones to be immediately targeted. Invariably you would be able to find a pattern to your lead profile to identify which types of profiles are definitely not promising and so you don’t need to spend time on those. If you are doing your own lead generation, create a lead qualification checklist and add some of these filters there.
If you have a marketing team doing lead generation, send these patterns to them so that they can change their lead generation criterion accordingly.
3. Make sure you know the external factors and events that will impact your sales this quarter
A very important aspect is to ensure you have mapped out external factors including socio-economic factors, political situations, festivals, or any other holiday periods that will impact your sales cycles.
You should also note the kind of sectors and businesses your customers are in and how their business situations will affect their purchase cycles.
There could also be potential opportunities with events that are happening related to your product or service which you can tap into to either get more leads or find an opportunity to meet prospects. Do make sure you calendarize all these events and factors into your selling cycles so you can plan your sales targets around them.
4. Set your lead measures right
An important aspect for you to stay on track with your targets is to ensure your lead measures are well in place and getting tracked on a daily/weekly basis.
Lead measures give you an excellent indication of whether you will meet your targets and guide you to take corrective actions sooner than later. Some important lead measures may include no. of calls and meetings being done by sales reps every day, lead to opportunity funnel movement, prospects’ reaction, and sentiment during the meetings, frequency of meeting with the customer, and so on.
It is extremely important to not just track the lead measures at your end, but also enable the team to track them by themselves so they are taking their own corrective actions on them on a daily basis.
5. Make sure your review mechanisms are in place and followed with discipline
Reviews are a must for selling teams and to do them constructively and keep on learning from every day and from each other’s experiences will make you successful as a team.
A good way to ensure reviews are done disciplined is to set your review timelines and calendarize them for the quarter so that everyone is well aware and aligned to those.
Make sure there is a way to have the necessary sales data for review, having a good format for highlighting and discussing the key areas where their are impediments, generating new ideas will do wonders for your review cycles.
Conclusion
Where there is a will, there is a way! And yes selling quarters can be fun and 100% targets can be achieved if the fundamentals are well in place and the right measures are being tracked well. You are well set, so go and beat your this quarter targets. Cheers and all the best!
We at Zipteams are working on making these lead measures available to sales teams in real-time. Do reach out to us if you need help with setting and tracking this for your sales teams.
Originally published at https://zipteams.com.
