INKED

14Qualifying

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a sales leader or sales enablement professional exclaim, “We’re pretty good at selling; we just don’t know how to close,” I’d have my own private island. I understand the frustration of the leaders of these salespeople. It’s hard to watch their sales teams struggle and even harder to justify missing sales numbers and forecasts.

Certainly, there are lots of reasons that salespeople fail to get ink:

• Engaging with stakeholders who cannot make decisions
• Failing to ask for and gain micro-commitments that advance the deal
• Pitching features rather than building a relevant business case linked to measurable business outcomes
• Negotiating before being selected as the vendor of choice

These things may all be true, but the brutal truth is when salespeople are having a difficult time closing there is almost always a direct correlation to a pipeline that is stuffed with opportunities that fail to meet even minimum qualification standards.

It’s not uncommon for my consultants at Sales Gravy to run murder boarding sessions (see my book Sales EQ) on a client’s pipeline and kill half to two-thirds of the deals in the pipe. It’s an eye-opening and gut-wrenching experience for leaders and their sales professionals to come face to face with the fact that their pipeline is a fabrication. It hurts, but you cannot take delusion to the bank.

When you choose delusion over reality, you are making a conscious choice not only to lie to yourself ...