Quick Take: 10 Ways to Fill Your Sales Pipeline

In this Quick Take episode, we're exploring one of the most crucial aspects of success as a business: the ability to keep your sales pipeline full.

By the end of this short episode, you'll have 10 effective tactics at your disposal to ensure that your sales pipeline is never empty.

LINKS:

The Center for Sales Strategy

Matt Sunshine

Transcript

Matt Sunshine: 0:15

Welcome to Improving Sales Performance, a podcast highlighting tips and insights aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience, aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience from a wide range of industries. I'm your host, matt Sunshine, ceo at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company. In this Quick Take episode, we're exploring one of the most crucial aspects of success as a business the ability to keep your sales pipeline full. By the end of this short episode, you'll have 10 effective tactics at your disposal to ensure that your sales pipeline is never empty. With that, let's dive in. All right, so these are 10 really great ways to fill your sales pipeline, and so let's just get into it. So number one is never stop prospecting. I mean, I can't say it enough, but the very best, the very best salespeople out there, they just never stop. They're always looking and they set a time to do it. They're intentional about their prospecting. Number two know who your customers are Like. Have a good handle on the categories of business or the job title of people. Know who your customers are. The very best salespeople have a keen sense of who are my best customers and who should I be spending time paying attention to, not just for prospecting, but even of your current customer base. You got to know who your very best customers are. Number three is ask for referrals. There's all sorts of data out there that would suggest that people would love to give referrals, and there's also data out there that shows and we know this to be true at CSS shows that salespeople are reluctant to ask for referrals. So you want to increase your pipeline, you want to build a stronger sales pipeline? Ask for referrals. The fourth thing is master upselling and cross-selling. Always be looking for additional opportunities to help or to provide solutions for your current customers, whether that means services that your company already has or cross-selling to services that maybe another part of your company offers. So upselling and cross-selling are two great ways to really increase that sales pipeline.

Matt Sunshine: 3:22

The next one is know what your triggers are. You know, right. You need to be keenly aware of what triggers. What are the triggers for your prospects? What are the triggers for your customers? What works, what works and what doesn't work? The very best. Salespeople absolutely know what it is, that, what triggers they can use to spark action, and that's really important.

Matt Sunshine: 3:54

Number seven number seven automate as much as possible. There's a lot of technology available out there. There's a lot of things that can help you to speed up your process or to increase the volume of your activity. Now, I'm not suggesting that you automate everything and you take the human out of the sales process, but I am saying let's take advantage of the technology that is available and automate what can be and what should be automated. Also, number eight very important drop your dead leads. Stop calling on leads that are wasting your time. If you've been calling on something for a really long time and there's been no significant movement forward, challenge yourself and say what do I think is going to happen that's going to make this still be a good client or a good prospect? Drop your dead leads. And number nine and this is so important all of these are important, but this one, I think, gets overlooked a lot Analyze your pipeline.

Matt Sunshine: 5:10

Take a look at what are your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to your pipeline. Do you have a lot of really good prospects? Are you able to get appointments with them? Have you done discovery meetings? Are you presenting proposals? Are you negotiating those proposals? Are you closing and winning those proposals, and where are your bottlenecks and where do you need to maybe spend a little bit more time?

Matt Sunshine: 5:39

Where do you need to improve or where do you need to accelerate your effort? How long are things staying in each one of those parts of the sales process? How long are they staying there? Are they staying there too long? What can you do to speed that up? And the last thing number 10, is always keep learning, always be learning, always be listening and asking questions. None of us know everything. Always be learning, and I think that will serve us well by taking that always be learning attitude. This has been Improving Sales Performance. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, join us every week by clicking the subscribe button. For more on the topics covered in the show, visit our website, thecenterforsalesstrategycom. There you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales performance.