B2B Sales Pipeline

We’ve all heard the phrases and more than likely utilized them. “There is no I in team,” and “Don’t give up until you reach the finish line.”

You probably think I’m referring to sports, whether it’s utilized in basketball, football or baseball. In fact, these quotes, analogies or any of the Vince Lombardi phrases that people toss around are applicable in business.

The world of business utilizes sports analogies and phrases so much for one reason: both sports and business rely heavily on teamwork. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to accomplish much of anything on the playing field or in the board room.

Recently, I was playing in a church league basketball game. With my team engaged in a tight contest, we suddenly found ourselves a man short on the court. This was not due to an injury or for a lack of players, but because one of our players decided to take a breather by going to the bench to catch his breath.

Now, imagine our surprise when we realized we had only four players on the court to the opposing teams five.  When up against superior numbers in a team game, the side with fewer people will always lose. Look at how hockey teams in the NHL do in power play situations. Have an advantage over your opponent, especially in terms of a numerical advantage, translates to scoring and the ultimate goal: winning.

Taking this story and applying it to the business world would be interesting. Imagine your team is comprised of sales and marketing individuals. The marketer’s job is to promote brand and consumer awareness of your product or service. By advertising and distributing information on your company, the marketer does everything in their power to create an atmosphere where the sales team will be successful in that selling that product or service. 

By making the public or other businesses desirous of your good or service, the marketing team has done their part, and then they hand off the task of closing the deal to the sales team. If the marketing team has done their part, then a slam dunk will occur on the sales-side of things.

Say though, the prospect is like most potential clients, and requires a longer sales cycle then the slam dunk prospect we are all hoping will come along.

At this juncture, the marketing team must continue to assist the sales team if a prospect needs to be nurtured along the path to the promised-land: the deal. 

But what is the best way to utilize both sales and marketing department’s valuable time? Drip Marketing.

Through drip marketing/drip emails, the sales team can stay in touch with a client that is not sales ready and send out personalized emails on a timed basis. These periodic, automated emails ensure that you stay in touch with a client and nurture them to sales ready status, all along automating the process to further qualify your lead. This can help to free up valuable time for both sales and marketing teams, leading to high fives all around.

In short, marketing and sales teams working together to both nurture and ultimately convert the prospect into a client is the end goal. If one falters then the team suffers, much like the basketball team I play on when we were in a four-on-five match-up. By using drip marketing/drip emails, both sales and marketing can focus on other avenues and constantly stay in the prospects mind, without to much of a time investment.

Oh, and just to put a further exclamation on the point: we lost that game by 19 points.

A website I try and frequent for timely and provocative information is www.salesteamtools.com. This fantastic compendium of knowledge offers those of us who make a living in sales a vast portal of knowledge and ideas to incorporate into our thought process and stimulate our thinking.

Upon returning from the winter holiday’s, I went to salesteamtools.com and read a fascinating post, entitled, “How I Improved My 2007 Sales Results.”

This got me thinking. What were the things I did in 2007 that not only improved my sales results, but conversely, what did I do to to hinder my sales results?

One of the things those of us in leadership roles in sales try and do is take on too many tasks, instead of delegating assignments to other team members. Instead of trying to tackle every new project or starting work on an ongoing project that would have monopolized my attention and produced less than stellar results, it is sometimes vital to delegate that assignment to another team member. Offloading tasks can be the best way to ensure that:

A. You finish the tasks and jobs you currently have on your plate and give the proper attention to them that they deserve.

B. You learn where your strengths and weakness are and where to focus. If you have a task you feel you aren’t suited for, then the best idea is to delegate that duty to another team member.

C. Your relationships with your existing clients won’t suffer, as the days of trying to make everyone happy will be over. Let one of your team members help out.

D. Your time management skills will increase/ coupled with increases in productivity and efficiency.

E. You will energize your team members by improving their self-reliability.

It might be to late to work on offloading duties in 2007, but with the start of brand new year, implementing this approach to your leadership style will produce big results in 2008, not only for yourself and your individual goals, but also your company’s sales goals.