The BIO Conference and Trade Show

The Conference and Trade Shows we attend include many connections with current, former, and future customers. There is a prospecting and new business development aspect to participating, but rarely is it ever “the meeting” where we get new business. The approach taken is to initiate, update and continue the development of value for the people we engage in a face-to-face basis. You simply cannot get the same level of engagement virtually.

It was great to see you all this week at BIO 2024 in my hometown. Safe, Productive and Happy Trails to the wonderful people encountered.

 

#BIO2024 #California Life Sciences Association, #Forge Biologics #CuriaGlobal and @AudreyGreenburg

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Meet Us in Amsterdam or Brussels: Account Management Process (AMP) for Upselling and Cross Selling

The Flannery Sales Systems team returns to Europe in June to deliver the customized AMP Workshop to a multinational customer in Brussels the week of June 17th. Tom Martin will join John to lead the Workshop to provide process, tools, selling skills and Coaching for immediate deployment to the field teams.

And in the week before (on June 13 and 14), John will be in Amsterdam to meet with prospects. If you are around and available for a coffee in either city, let us know and we will meet up.

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Pipeline to Success

Most senior executives have found themselves reflecting on the past quarter’s results and questioning the projections for future quarters.  Quarter or year-end discounting, a flurry of end of quarter deal closings and just plain wishful thinking are all common behaviors that cast some legitimate doubts over the future quarters’ forecast.

Having confidence in your pipeline is the key to meeting or exceeding sales quotas.  In just about any economic environment, missing sales goals is not a situation any executive team wants to end up in but all too often, there’s that quarter or year-end surprise.  Here are a few best practices to consider:

  1. Have Enough Opportunities – Depending on the length of your sales cycle and your win ratio, this will vary.  As a rule of thumb, if you don’t have at least three times the amount of opportunities in the pipeline as your sales goal, you may be looking at a pipe dream instead of a pipeline.
  2. Grade the Opportunities – Not all opportunities are created equal.  You must have measureable fact based rules for assigning values to each of the opportunities. Using historical data to grade the opportunities in the pipeline is critical to creating an accurate forecast.  Using standardized milestones for each opportunity in the pipeline is the primary tool for assigning a grade.
  3. Create an Opportunity Profile – Using historical data to understand the characteristics of different types of deals in your pipeline will keep your team focused on making sure they have a portfolio of A, B and C opportunities.  Concentrating all your resources on a few “A” opportunities can often lead to disappointment or reduced margins if you need to discount to salvage too few opportunities in the pipeline.  An “A”, “B” or “C” opportunity can be upgraded with a new budget year, a new decision maker at the customer company or just by creating a new urgency to benefit from the value of your solution.
  4. Ongoing Business Development – Waiting till the pipeline is getting empty or till the end of the quarter is a recipe for failure. The amount of time spent on business development may vary, but having salespeople spend 10-20% of their time every week or month is a good rule of thumb.  Opportunities in the pipeline are constantly being closed, downgraded or deleted.  Business development activity is a critical step to maintaining the pipeline.  By doing ongoing business development, you are more likely to reconnect with an opportunity that is in the process of going into play.
  5. Define your Sales Process – Having a clear view of how long it takes different types of opportunities to move through the pipeline is essential to managing your opportunities.  While sometimes a sales cycle may be compressed by an offer to discount, more often than not, the buyer just bakes in your new offer into the negotiation and proceeds to move towards a decision on their same timetable.  If you offer a discount too early, they may use that as a starting point for future negotiations.
  6. Ongoing Inspection – If the management team doesn’t inspect the pipeline regularly, it shouldn’t expect to have a high degree of confidence in hitting the goal.  It’s only human nature that sales teams will pay attention to the things that their management focuses on.  If there is a focus on evaluating opportunities, the sales team will make sure they have opportunities.  The goal is to close sales, but leads and opportunities just don’t magically appear.

Managing a sales pipeline is an arduous task that requires diligence, detail and discipline.  The alternative is to resort to strategies that have failed the test of time like “Spray and Pray”, “Hail Mary” and wishful thinking.  There’s no time like the present to schedule a pipeline review.  The longer you wait, the more likely you are to miss your goal.

Flannery Sales Systems helps organizations develop and implement a repeatable sales process.  Improving the effectiveness of your sales organization is the key outcome we provide to clients.  We would welcome an opportunity to explore your needs and understand where you could benefit from improved skills and sales processes.  Flannery Sales Systems works with a broad cross section of industries and we are confident we can enhance your results.

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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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Pipeliner CRM Round Table

I participated in an engaging roundtable hosted by Pipeliner CRM (www.pipelinersales.com), delving into the profound influence of AI on our business landscape. The discussion generated captivating perspectives and insights from diverse businesses. Here are the 4 key highlights that resonated with me.

  1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding.Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.
  2. The United States leads China, the EU, and the U.K. as the leading source of top Al models. In 2023, 61 notáble Al models originated from U.S.-based institutions, far outpacing the European Union’s 21 and China’s 15
  3. The data is in: Al makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work. In 2023, several studies assessed Al’s impact on labor, suggesting that Al enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated Al’s potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Still, other studies caution that using Al without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.
  4. People across the globe are more cognizant of Al’s potential impact-and more nervous. A survey from Ipsos shows that, over the last year, the proportion of those who think Al will dramatically affect their lives in the next three to five years has increased from 60% to 66%. Moreover, 52% express nervousness toward Al products and services, marking a 13 percentage point rise from 2022. In America, Pew data suggests that 52% of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about Al, rising from 37% in 2022.
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On The Road Again: Milan, Italy

It’s Design Week here in Milan, and automotive, fashion and artistic leaders are displaying the latest in cutting-edge design. We are working with a customer to craft their sales process for success. Listen to the video for more. Ciao!

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