Leading Growth

11Opportunities

WE USE THE word effectiveness to describe the efficacy of an individual salesperson or a sales team. The more effective the individual, the easier it is to win opportunities. The less effective, the more difficult it will be for them to capture opportunities. There are a couple ways you might measure effectiveness. One is to look at a salesperson's win rate—a good metric, even if it doesn't always tell the whole story. A salesperson might have a great win rate in Q1 because they had good timing and good fortune, but it's unlikely they can ride that luck all the way through Q4. The second way you might measure effectiveness is the size of the client a salesperson is capable of winning, especially winning on their own. A combination of the two gives you a better picture of the individual's real sales effectiveness.

Your role as the leader is to teach, train, develop, and coach your team, improving their effectiveness in winning more than their “fair share” of the deals they pursue. In this chapter, we will look at the conversations that will help improve your team's effectiveness and help them win more deals.

A Full Opportunity Review

When we discussed the Weekly Pipeline Meeting, I warned against using that time to talk through the status of each deal. The reason you can make the pipeline meeting a group event is because it is short and because it creates accountability. There is no value in your sales force listening to their peers talk about the status of ...