San Diego State Adds Sales to Business School Curriculum

SDSU announced the addition of a series of Sales courses to the College of Business’s Marketing Department.  John (above) was pleased to participate with Dean Michael Cunningham as a speaker at the Kickoff event held on campus.  John, an active SDSU alumnus, was a recognized for his leadership in the field of sales and building enhanced sales competencies for his customers.

“Business and industry has a steady demand for qualified sales professionals and San Diego State University is one of the few major universities that has stepped up to educate our students to fill this critical corporate need,” said Dr. Michael R. Cunningham, dean of the College of Business Administration at San Diego State University. “The contemporary sales professional requires the ability and competencies needed to develop networking skills, relationship building and analytical proficiencies which are primary elements in the College’s sales educational initiative.”

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Build Pipeline NOW to Close 2025 Strong

You wrapped up Q1 and are almost done with Q2. Soon you’ll have a full tally of how your sales teams did with top and bottom-line results in July. For many, the Summer comes in fast and furious as you recover from the mid-year push and assemble your teams to plan for the rest of the year.

So, exhale for a moment and breathe deeply; now is the time to take a good, hard look at your opportunity pipeline for the balance of 2025. Are there enough qualified opportunities in development to enable you to exceed your revenue plans? Ignore the adage that you need to have “three times” the revenue in your pipeline to hit your annual plan – it’s not only a bad guess for how to hit your number, but it’s also a dangerous precedent for sellers who aren’t sure what a healthy pipeline actually looks like.

Here is what your sales leaders need to do NOW to make sure there is enough revenue working:

  • Establish Qualified Opportunity Criteria:this should have been done by January 1, but if you haven’t done it yet, it’s not too late. Make sure each member of your team knows the criteria required to categorize an opportunity as qualified. (We have done this with our customers, and can send anonymous examples to you by request to john@drive-revenue.com)

 

  • Coach Opportunity Development EARLY: don’t wait until the negotiation is coming to a head to parachute in and close the deal for the seller. Salespeople learn nothingfrom this, except perhaps how you close, which won’t help them when you aren’t there. Set a schedule with each of your reps to coach them on how to successfully navigate their open opportunities, and make sure a complete job is done in early stages.

 

  • Practice Skill Conversations:from prospecting to qualification and all the way through negotiation, make sure your team members are fluent in all aspects of the conversations they will have with customers and prospects. Not all sellers need every skill improved; a good benchmark is to pick one skill per rep per month and ensure that it is really mastered.

Once you have these basics in place, we can look at how to build the right opportunity mix for a healthy, balanced revenue pipeline. But without doing the work to establish opportunity criteria, coaching opportunity development and practicing skill conversations, you’re sure to have some gaps in your pipeline that will make it very difficult to achieve your annual plan. If you do the heavy lifting now, you will avoid the year-end fire drills that many organizations go through to hit their numbers in Q4.

 

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Ask A Sales Leader: Jessica McClure

1.  What was it like coming from a Scientific Background to a Sales role?

I started as a lab rat. It was my responsibility to maintain the lab while running my own experiments. As the person that had once been the main point of contact with our various vendors/ salespeople, I felt that I was able to move into a sales role with relevant firsthand experience. Having been the customer myself and therefore knowing how I wanted to be sold to, I was able to craft my style accordingly and bring more immediate connection and value as well as credibility to my own customers.

2.  How did you get into the Sales leadership role you’re in today?

I moved into a leadership role relatively quickly in my career due to a variety of reasons. I started with a small company that needed someone with a strong science background to help train their salesforce. From there I found myself wearing multiple hats and as I moved from one company to another, I was afforded many opportunities to work across a variety of departments always within the commercial team. All those experiences helped mold me into the professional that I am today making the transition to the role that I have now a natural fit.

3. How do you improve the skills of your sales team?

I feel that no one should ever stop learning in any role that you are in. I encourage my team to take on new projects all the time that stretch their skill sets to help them become more well-rounded individuals and contributors to our organization. We ensure we have an ongoing series of companywide training courses as well to keep skills fresh and sharp and to allow for each person to evolve over time.Once everyone has had the opportunity to take these core programs, we add on new ones to not only maintain fundamental behaviors but also to support further advancement of those key areas.

4.  What advice would you give to other Sales Leaders?

Invest in your people. Always.And never stop doing it. Whether it is for their immediate needs or their long-term growth, it is essential that you offer a variety of options for your team to learn and expand their knowledge base. Don’t expect them to do it on their own–rather make it a requirement. It is your responsibility to ensure your team knows their worth to the company and further training them is just one way to do so. They are your most valuable asset, and the investment is more than worthwhile–it’s necessary.

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The Top 3 Milestones for Sales Success

Over the past few years, the majority of the work that we have done with customers is on defining (or refining) their sales process. This was necessitated by the dramatic changes exhibited in buying behavior during the pandemic. And indeed, the most important aspect of our customer’s sales processes is that it mirrors how their customers buy from them.  During conversations in both a formal and informal settings, we are asked “how many steps should there be in the sales process?”  If we knew that exact answer for each of our customers, we would be retired and they would have Instagram-like success!

So instead of trying to pinpoint the exact number of steps in a sales process, here are the must have, Top Three milestones that each team/seller must have in place to assure success. Please note that very few of our B to B customers have only 3 milestones (or stages), but when pushed to the wall, here are the 3 you can’t live (or sell) without:

1-     Access to the Key Players (Decision Maker): there is nothing new to the notion that you must get access to all of the key players, but the budget scrutiny that many organizations have placed on all expenditures has made this step even more difficult. A clear articulation on how all important titles would benefit from the usage of your product/service is a mandatory requirement for completing this stage.

2-     Clear Understanding of Value: once you have the access as described in #1, can the individuals understand the value that your offering provides. Without this, you will be dancing in the dark when it comes time to go into the evaluation phase.

3-     An Approved Implementation Plan: approved as you co-develop the opportunity with your customer/prospect, not after the deal is signed. This sole step can help you to determine your “pole position” deep into opportunity development, and the seriousness of the participant’s gauges how “sticky” your solution will be thereafter.

One of our customers in the Medical Device industry was struggling to get into conversations with the key players in their existing customer base on a new offering they had obtained through an acquisition. The offering was an existing diagnostic test with a new enhanced feature.  The challenge was that the enhanced feature  provided a benefit that had never been completely commercialized. We sat down with a cross functional team from their organization and built a pro-forma model of what impact the solution had on the existing practices in the testing environment, and who would benefit from this.  They went searching for data to substantiate their assertions of what value this add-on widget could provide.  They found a reputable research company that had done a study that provided the information they were looking for.  We were able to help build a dollar value and a testing value into a pro-forma model (Benefit Summary). The Benefit Summary provided all involved with a complete understanding of the value of their new enhanced feature.

Next, we helped them to create a prototype of an Implementation Plan that correlated with how they could roll this out to their customers. Once completed, the sales process plan was delivered and executed with their main customers.  As a result, they have successfully sold an additional 12% in total revenue on this product alone in an $80 million dollar division.

What are you or your organization waiting for to drive more revenue? Let us help you to define (or refine) these steps and start picking up incremental revenue now!

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