The Luxury Of Choice

At a customer sales meeting recently, they ran a session on the pitfalls of Sam Salesperson.  Sam was struggling.  After one promising quarter, the next two missed target.  The problem was an age-old one; not enough prospects.  This proved to be a double-edged sword, for not only did it mean that their funnel was never quite deep enough, it also meant that they spent far too much time trying to progress deals that, frankly, should never have been pursued that far in the first place.

The solution discussed involved striving to gain a ‘luxury of choice’.  The idea is that you can never have too much on the go.  The more you have to chase after, the more likely you are to enjoy the benefits of brutal qualification.  And dramatically improve overall close rates.

So, the killer question, how do you obtain a luxury of choice?  For these guys, it meant knowing where every single prospect on their patch was on their current buying cycle potential.  They wanted to look at a kind of ‘gap analysis’, and pick out the prospects with a profile that typically suggests acceptance of their ideas.