Pipeline Management Made Easy With Deal Flow

Learning and leveraging the three prospect stages can profoundly increase sales productivity. This article provides timely strategies to make this happen. 

The three stages?

Stage one: People who have had a first meeting with you and who have agreed to talk with you again at a specific date and time.

Stage two: Right budget, right person, right plan – and your contact has agreed to talk with you again at a specific date and time.

Stage three: verbal agreement to do business with you; clear start date.

As a professional seller, you need more than just one sale- but you do not need luck. You need Deal Flow; and Deal Flow comes from Pipeline Management. Pipeline Management is a fancy term that means “effectively compensating for the fact that prospects fall away over time.” Consider this: By the time you have the right number of prospects in Stage One – prospects that come from the best of the new appointments you’ve recently set – you will move perhaps two prospects over to Stage Two, while moving perhaps one prospect over to Stage Three. (That’s the call from the prospect saying, “We want to work with you, I’m sending the contract tomorrow.”) This is basic sales physics. The arrow that moves from left to right is the selling equivalent of gravity. More prospects will fall away than move forward. So a prospect moving from Stage Two to Stage Three would be a great development if you only needed one sale, but you need more. That means the short-term effects of closing that one sale can be a little frightening. After all, your best prospect just converted from prospect to customer – and the majority of the remaining prospects will, thanks to the laws of sales physics, backtrack to inactive status. Prospect backtrack is a natural phenomenon: the simple matter is, the pipeline reflects an instant in an ever shifting, dynamic pattern, and within that pattern, most prospects simply do not close.

Remember: we are tracking prospects, which means “people who have proven their willingness to move the deal forward by scheduling a meeting with us in the immediate future so they can discuss doing business with us.” If your contact doesn’t fit that definition, he or she is not a prospect!

So now the question becomes:

How do you get that many prospects?

Key point: To get Deal Flow, what you really need is enough prospects in that first stage to close the one deal you want to close this month (or whatever your goal is)… and still have enough left over to offset the majority of backward-moving prospects you’ll be looking at the month after that. And the month after that…. And the month after that….

You cannot get there by loading up your pipeline and then focusing on nothing but closing for the rest of your career. You can get there, however, by replacing backward moving prospects – at the same rate you are losing them. This strategy is both a science and an art. The first step is knowing your own numbers and your own ratios. How many new contacts do you need in the “first appointment” category to feed Stage One (and, eventually, Stages Two and Three)? There really is a number you must identify, a number that you can use to calibrate your own personal sales goal. If you know what that number is, you can create and maintain that level of new opportunity at all times. If you do not know the number, then, you cannot hit the target. The next critical step is recognizing a backward-moving prospect so that you know what is about to be lost. All too often, a prospect that appears to be nailed in place is really just hanging there by a thread. That thread has a formal name: time.

Believe it. The longer a prospect sits in place, the less likely it will ever advance.

Think about it: yesterday’s “great prospect” will move backward if not spoken to for, say, three straight months. Even when spoken to, and they say to keep waiting for a decision – the same thing is happening over that three-month time span. Our income potential is diminishing with each passing day. The art of pipeline management lies in learning to recognize the point at which prospects tend to fall away, and how to respond when they do.

This is the subject of a whole different course – one on sales management. For now, ponder this: If an inordinate amount of your fallaways occur after people reach Stage Three, then you are in all likelihood not gathering the right information up front and not talking to the right people. Until you improve your interviewing skills, you will continue to spend too much of your time misclassifying low-level prospects that are doomed to fail.

About the Author

Steve Bookbinder, CEO and lead trainer for Internet Advertising Institute has over a decade of experience selling online media, search engine marketing, and advertising. He has written and co-written more than 25 books, articles and audio training programs, and is most recently the author, with Jeff Goldberg, of How to Be Your Own Coach.To read more about the topic in this article or explore the online training courses visit http://www.InternetAdvertisingInstitute.com

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