pipeline Archives - Braveheart Sales Performance

Our Top 5 Sales Management Blog Posts of All Time

Some of our readers have been loyally following our posts from the beginning, way back in 2012. Others have discovered Braveheart’s Sales Management Blog more recently. If you stumbled upon us in the past year or two, you likely missed some of our most popular posts.

Here are our top five most widely-read posts of all time (plus three of our favorites). If you haven’t read these Braveheart classics yet, I think you will find them still relevant and full of useful insights.

1) Sales Managers Need to Spend 50% of Their Time Coaching Salespeople

Published on December 5, 2013, this post is short […]

Is Your Pipeline a Pipe Dream? How to Tame Your Sales Pipeline

I facilitated a Sales Swap Meet™ this week with a collection of business owners.* If you aren’t familiar with a Sales Swap Meet, it is where business owners and CEOs bring their questions, concerns, and problems regarding their sales organization and swap them for ideas, suggestions and answers.

The topic we spent the most time on was what to measure and how to measure it. I thought I would recap for you what we discussed since it is of high importance for any business. What I heard was that the majority of the folks keep track of a pipeline and some […]

Sales Digest: Make Your Pipeline More Effective

Braveheart Sales Digest
Focus On: Improving Your Sales Pipeline

The inaugural edition of our sales digest was well-received, so we are doing it again around a new theme: the sales pipeline. If you follow Braveheart’s Sales Management Blog, you have likely heard me refer to the “fluffy pipeline syndrome.” It’s a real thing that can seriously undercut sales performance.

In 2013, The TAS Group reported that only 46% of sales reps feel their pipeline is accurate. Find out what leading sales experts have to say now about building and maintaining an effective sales pipeline.

From the Women Sales Pros Network:

Title: Your Sales Pipeline is Not […]

How to Fix the 5 Most Common Sales Team Defects

I wrote about this a few years ago in a series of blogs but I wanted to do an update that sums up the common causes of problems with sales teams — and their fixes— in a single article. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list.

Here are five of the most common defects in sales teams:

1. Your salespeople aren’t asking enough open-ended questions.
2. Your salespeople wait for leads to come to them.
3. Your new salesperson didn’t turn out to be the person you thought you were hiring.
4. Your salespeople go after the wrong deals.
5. Your salespeople don’t close.

Problem #1: […]

Sales Manager Checklist for the New Year

It’s a new year filled with hope and promise, a clean slate, and new sales goals. Hopefully you experienced a good year and got to celebrate a little bit, but it is time now to move on to attacking this year’s goals.

Here is a quick checklist for sales managers to make sure everyone is focused correctly.

All individual salespeople must know the expectations of them with regard to sales, including where the sales need to come from – new clients vs. expansion of existing clients or some combination thereof.
The compensation plan must be clearly articulated to each of the salespeople on the team […]

Sales Managers: Never, Ever, Ever Give Up

I was in a conversation with a friend and sales manager yesterday and we were discussing their fantastic year— including all the changes that have occurred and the great sales growth they have experienced. He shared with me that he felt a little guilty because he let off the gas. The team was hitting on all cylinders and they were beating sales expectations. He eased up a little. Sales faltered for a few months. He felt bad that he failed his sales team because they probably didn’t sell as much as they could have had he stayed focused.

This is a common […]

Long Sales Cycles, Large Transactions: Activity Plans Still Important

Of the dozens of sales teams I work with each year, there are always a few that sell large scale services or products with longer sales cycles; typically at least 6 months and as long as 18 months or more. Generally, the salespeople in these cases are paid larger base salaries because it is so long between sales and the upside variable compensation is less than it would be more transactional types of sales. In some instances, all the salesperson needs to do is close one or two deals a year and everyone is happy.

It seems that in these situations, […]

Sales Pipeline Review Meetings: Boring, Time Wasting and Useless

Are you still conducting boring sales team meetings where the whole sales team gets prepared to share what garbage they have in their pipeline? Well if you are, stop it.

You might think that by publicly causing all the salespeople to share their deals in front of the whole team, it will make their competitive spirit come out and cause them to do more activity to create more opportunities. WRONG. This is why:

It causes perfectly good salespeople to spend time preparing slides or a report to get ready. This time could be better spent selling something.
It causes salespeople to believe that the […]

Batter Up! Applying Sports Theory to Sales Performance

With the beginning of baseball season I find myself thinking about what those baseball players have done all winter to prepare for the season. It is a long and grueling season with 162 games per team in MLB. It isn’t too dissimilar from an effective sales year or career. The best salespeople recognize that their year is like a marathon. They have to consistently and methodically perform.

I believe that most MLB players spend their off-season preparing for the upcoming season. They don’t sit around and eat bon-bons, expecting that they will show up for Spring Training in perfect form. They […]