This weekend, a deer ran across the highway and hit our car.  The deer was injured but she did manage to run away so we were relieved that she wasn't killed.  After we returned home, I couldn't find our dog, Dinger.  Regular readers may remember Dinger from these posts:

My Dog Has Better Listening Skills Than Most Salespeople 

Top Salespeople are 631% More Effective at This Than Weak Salespeople

How Top Salespeople Manage Resistance

Which Salespeople are Easier to Train - Veteran Salespeople or Millennials?

I found Dinger with his nose glued to my front bumper where some of the deer's hair was still attached to my car.  Dinger, who loves to bark at deer from the safety of our home, seemed to be saying, "Ohhhh, so THIS is what a deer smells like!"

The exact same thing happened to a salesperson I was training.  It wasn't a deer or a dog, it was about Jim's sales aha moment.

His team was asked to send me an email with their five biggest lessons from their first six months of training.  Among Jim's top five was this one:

Your own bias affects the selling process - Wow!  I did not realize that my biases are affecting my sales process and approaches.  For example, I have a money bias that was unknown to me until recently.  I make a strange face (as if I am going to get punched in the face) whenever I tell the client the cost for a service or product.  I started noticing my strange face recently on my zoom calls and I now know that my money bias was likely affecting my sales.  I was not confident in my ask for the cost of the service or the product and thus it showed on my face as I waited for the client's rebuttal.  (And usually their rebuttal would feel like they punched me in the face)

What a great lesson!  Jim was referring to a sales competency found in his Sales DNA called Comfortable Discussing Money and an attribute called High Money Tolerance found in another competency, Supportive Buy Cycle. 

Salespeople who don't have high money tolerance become very uncomfortable when the amount of money being discussed exceeds the amount they consider to be a lot of money.  Jim believed that $500 is a lot of money yet he was asking companies for $500,000.  No wonder he made a strange face - that's 1,000 times greater than his choking point!  If the salesperson lacks confidence in how much money they are asking for, why in the world would we expect the prospect to have any confidence about buying from the salesperson?

The top 10% of all salespeople are 4,000% more comfortable discussing money than the weakest 10% - 4,000%!  And the top 10% of all salespeople are 100% more likely to have a high money tolerance than the weakest 10%.

Finally, being comfortable discussing money and having a high money tolerance directly support a salesperson's ability to uncover the actual budget.  Salespeople who do uncover the actual budget are 172% more likely to close the business - 172%!

Objective Management Group (OMG) measures 21 Sales Core Competencies and has assessed more than 2.2 million salespeople.  You can view some of the data here, see how the data changes by industry, and how you and/or your sales team compares to other companies in your industry and overall.

I don't get stressed anymore when I'm driving.  All it took was for me to not exceed the speed limit.  I'm not sure whether it was my navigation system repeatedly telling me to "obey all traffic laws" each time I started the car, or my wife reminding me that I needed to be a good role model for our soon-to-be driving 16 year-old son.  I admit that this was much easier for me to do after I gave up my Jaguar for a Lincoln Navigator.  It holds much more baseball equipment!

There is an exception to not exceeding the speed limit.  When the flow of traffic in all lanes is moving exponentially faster than you are, you must increase your speed to match the flow of traffic or risk getting run over!

That brings me to pipeline flow.

I was doing a top/bottom analysis of a sales force where we look at their top 5 producers and their bottom 5 performers and from among 180 findings and scores, identify the differences between the tops and bottoms. We usually find between 15-20 significant differentiators but for this particular sales force I wasn't finding much.  Until I came to the pipeline.  Their top producers prospected consistently, successfully scheduled new meetings, and had full pipelines.  They were also rejection proof, didn't procrastinate, and didn't need prospects to like them.  In other words, their scores in all aspects of the Hunting Competency were near 100 while the bottom performers had scores below 50.

The thing that is most interesting about that is that these are findings that SHOULD have been obvious to the client - but they weren't.  99% of the time, we identify findings, scores, insights and differences that are complete surprises but this time?  Nobody was paying attention and as such, just couldn't understand why these 3 were doing so poorly.

This top/bottom analysis not only revealed a selection problem, where they hired people for hunting roles who couldn't hunt, but a sales management problem too. It would seem that there was no accountability for salespeople to use CRM and it's unlikely that sales management was reviewing the dashboard or reading any of the reports.  This problem would have been easy to spot months earlier if either of those two best practices were being followed.  

Pipeline flow doesn't really refer to the size of the pipeline though.  Flow measures how opportunities move through the pipeline.  From milestone to milestone, activity to activity and stage to stage.  Most salespeople have bottlenecks that inhibit the flow in their pipeline.  The bottleneck is the point in the sales process where a salesperson's opportunities most often get stuck.  Knowing where they get stuck is helpful, but knowing why they get stuck is essential.  You can't fix the problem unless you know why.

It might be as simple as Johnny isn't reaching the actual decision makers.  That's not the why, that's the where. It's a milestone in a stage.  The why can be anything from:

• Non-supportive beliefs in which the voice in Johnny's head might sound like, "I don't need to speak with the actual decision maker because my contact will take care of it"
• Lack of skills whereby Johnny doesn't know how to get the actual decision maker engaged
• A need to be liked where Johnny worries that if he asks to meet with the actual decision maker he might piss off his contact who won't like him anymore
• Lack of consultative selling capabilities where Johnny got the prospect to "nice to have" but not as far as "must have".  As a result, there is no compelling reason for the prospect to go to or get the decision maker engaged

My favorite CRM application is Membrain which is great for a complex sale.  It's opportunity-focused and has great pipeline management features among many other things right out of the box.  Membrain not only measures time in stage, but also measures stalled opportunities. That helps you get started with the where and the why analysis.  The image below shows a stalled opportunity analysis for a top salesperson.

The graph makes it very obvious.  If an opportunity stalls for more than 33 days, the salesperson will probably not get the business.  There were five outliers between 76-132 days but they are the exceptions, not the rule.  The 35 wins inside of 33 days, and the 27 losses after 33 days are the rule.

Because Membrain is opportunity focused, you can easily identify where the bottleneck is.  I clicked through on the 6 opportunities to the right of the 33 day mark and most of them lacked the funds to move forward.  That's the where.  The why could be skill, discomfort talking about money (when the budget isn't there) or the less obvious one, failure to uncover a compelling reason to buy.  That means nice to have but not must have.  When a salesperson reaches must have, the prospect must find the money.  When the salesperson only reaches nice to have, it's not crucial to find the money.  When attempting to uncover compelling reasons to buy, it's just like driving in a 55 MPH zone and you must reduce your speed as you enter a 40 MPH zone.  SLOW DOWN.  

And that concludes today's lesson on pipeline flow.  Now you're in the flow.

Image Copyright iStock Photos

If you binge-watched the classic TV Series 24, but fall asleep during late-night episodes you will always be saved by:

PREVIOUSLY ON 24...

With that in mind, I will save you if you didn't happen to read the previous article - a pre-requisite for this one.

PREVIOUSLY ON UNDERSTANDING THE SALES FORCE...

My article revealed that salespeople who are burdened with the need to be liked are far less effective at selling than those who don't have that weakness.  The biggest insight of all was that these salespeople were 47% less effective reaching decision makers!

This article will take the same approach and use the same data from Objective Management Group's (OMG) evaluations of 2,064,425 salespeople to look at salespeople who are uncomfortable having a financial conversation with their prospects and customers.  The latest data reveals that 60% of all salespeople have this weakness!  What do you think it will reveal?

As you might guess, the money weakness effects fewer competencies than the need to be liked.  Where the need to be liked has an impact on sales effectiveness in 7 of 21 sales competencies, discomfort discussing finances impacts only 4 of those sales competencies.  See the table below.

It should not be a surprise that this weakness has an impact on the Value Seller (47% less effective), Qualifier  (50% less effective) and Negotiator (46% less effective) competencies.  What might be surprising is the overall impact it has on Sales Percentile (they score 69% worse overall) and Opportunity Probability.  Salespeople who are uncomfortable having the financial conversation are 50% less likely to close their opportunities than those who are comfortable!  That's huge!  Coincidentally (we are measuring different things here), that is the same difference as in the Qualifier competency. 

But the big story here is not the difference in effectiveness.  In my opinion, there are two big stories with discomfort talking about money.

1. Wasted time and energy - just think about the calls, meetings, visits, quotes, proposals and people that were involved in the HALF of opportunities that didn't close.  That is a huge waste.
2. Lost opportunity - think about two numbers - either the value of a customer, account or deal and the number of customers, accounts or deals in a year.   Let's pretend that a deal is worth an average of $25,000 and each salesperson closes an average of 4 per month or 48 per year.  That comes out to $1.2 million.  If a salesperson with this weakness is wasting 50% of his opportunities, that is $1.2 million in lost opportunities - PER SALESPERSON - with this one Sales DNA weakness!

While the need to be liked can take many months to overcome, overcoming one's discomfort discussing finances is more of a decision to simply have these conversations.  So if you have this weakness, the $1.2 million dollar question is, are you ready to double your sales?

Read the discussion and add your comment to the LinkedIn thread for this article.