If you’re ready to improve your win rate or just stuck, try this one.
The easiest position to take in any business case is the status quo. That’s a lesson salespeople learn often, and often the hard way.
Identifying who in your pipeline is an actual target versus who’s going to spin your wheels is something that the best salespeople seem to do more often than not. These are the types who have a knack for choosing the right opportunities to pursue, a gift that shows up as a higher win rate.
Most of us lose more than we win. Everyone wants to reverse the order of those words. Yet many salespeople spend too much of their valuable time pursuing customers who are either going to buy from a competitor or, even more likely, lose out on a sale to the biggest source of loss there is: doing nothing.
So how does a salesperson who wants to improve and is committed to doing the work to get better actually use their time more wisely?
I know there are plenty of tools out there. But if I had to cite one that I’ve found will boost sales discipline and judgment, it would be the Sales Progression Index.
This free tool is potent but not hard to use. It won’t take up much of your time. What it will do is force you to answer nine questions as objectively as possible and, in the best case scenario, identify how you might improve your win rate.
Let me give you an example: Years ago, a salesperson on my team had a customer who’d been stuck in the pipeline for months. When I forced the sales rep to go through the process of completing the Sales Progression Index, we saw the highest scores across the board – except for one category, asking if the client “has a defined decision-making process and criteria.” On that issue the rep assigned a score of zero.
That immediately jolted me. I told the sales rep we needed to talk to our contact, the customer’s chief information officer. That conversation quickly revealed some issues we weren’t aware of previously: First, that the CIO was new to the company; second, that the deal required signoff from the CFO; and third, that the CIO hadn’t even brought the proposal to his boss yet.
What followed was a meeting with the CIO and CFO. Some simple questions and specific answers during a quick meeting that ended with the CFO asking when we could get the deal done. A process that had been stalled for months was resolved in a matter of hours, in large part because of the Sales Progression Index’s ability to identify weaknesses that needed to be addressed.
Why don’t more people go after such low-hanging fruit? It’s hard to say. We all know we should go to the gym, yet nine out of 10 of us don’t do so on a regular basis. It isn’t that those 90% are satisfied with the prospect of potentially aging more quickly and dying younger. It’s just that very few people have this simple kind of discipline.
When an individual decides to implement that discipline, the results can be transformative. That’s especially true when an entire organization adopts it.
One Fortune 30 company decided to use the Sales Progression Index globally. It became so adept at using it that the company had extremely valuable internal data – enough to be able to identify the specific pattern of answers most likely to lead to a sale. This wasn’t a case where every answer got the top score. It was a blend of scores unique to the company and the customers it served.
Sometimes, because of the skills that work best, I’ve heard salespeople compared to doctors. The Sales Progression Index makes sense in that context: a doctor doesn’t just check your blood pressure once. They do it every visit as a matter of discipline, because knowing the score without context doesn’t say much, but knowing what it’s been in multiple instances can be a powerful guide to identifying the best treatment. The Sales Progression Index also is a diagnostic tool – a way of narrowing down an entire field’s worth of possibilities to figure out what ails a customer (or patient) and how to best address it.
Completing the Sales Progression Index, or getting a blood pressure reading, is not hard to do. It doesn’t take a lot of time. But its value is revealed the moment an outlier number or test result shows up.
If you’re not persuaded, take a look backward. Ask yourself if you’re happy with your win rate in the just-completed quarter. Even more telling, review this year’s work and identify the customers who took up a lot of your time with little to show for it. Would it have been useful to disengage earlier? Would it have been helpful to use a tool that could have identified those customers who were most likely to buy and those who weren’t?
I already know the answers to these questions for myself. I’ve done the work, decades of it, with the Sales Progression Index as a guide. I suggest that now it’s your turn.
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