One day earlier this month, I got up for my morning routine and went to pack my breakfast – which, since my wife became a nutrition coach and got me on a solid path, usually consists of some whole grains and fresh fruit. I’d been craving a banana and had not had one in a while. I rounded the corner to my kitchen, filled up my coffee, reached into the fruit basket and without even looking broke off a banana from the bunch. The ensuing “snap” let me know what my eyes now confirmed – it was a [very] green banana and was not going to do me any good that day. “Maybe by the end of the week,” I said. The more familiar scenario in my house is that we find there are several brown spotted bananas which we quickly convert to banana bread and all is well. But as I completed my commute to work that day it got me thinking. Do we have any “green bananas” in our pipeline?

Looking at my firm’s business after the big push to the finish in 2011 had my team wondering about the top of our sales funnel, which we had not done in a while.

After spending so much time nurturing the mature opportunities through the more time-consuming stages of qualification, proposals, contracts, and closure, we turned our eyes to the top of the funnel, and were not happy with what we saw. We had just baked a big loaf of banana bread but the basket was lower than we liked, except for a some [very] green bananas.

How many times have you found yourself dealing with the mature deals in your pipeline like those ripe bananas and wondering, “Now what?” Or, looking at a bunch of green bananas and wondering how long it would be until you could eat?

Well, it’s all about managing your produce.

1. Block out time and buy some green bananas. Treat your demand generation and lead follow-up time as sacred. Book time during your week for this “appointment” of new sales activities and keep that meeting no matter what. Bring in the fresh stock!
2. Spend time balancing ripeness. Get face-to-face with your clients.  Never Eat Alone. Use coffee in the morning and lunch in the afternoon as ways to strike up conversations in your network to keep the produce moving through the process. It may not pay off today, but your deals will mature when you need them down the line. Personally, I’m finding more people willing to grab a quick coffee or be treated to an eat-in lunch at their office these days than taking time for dinners or playing rounds of golf like the heyday.  The point is, you need to spend one-on-one time to ripen your deals.
3. Rotate your stock. My firm uses salesforce.com for CRM (full disclosure, we also do consulting on the product and it is my personal favorite after using many over the years – contact me if you’s like to learn more) but whatever CRM system you use, be sure that it serves its core purpose – to allocate your precious resources across the portfolio of opportunities to maximize your business by helping your customers. To do this, you need to be sure about where you are in the buying/selling process. You need to know that you are taking the right action and applying the right resources. Use your CRM system to ensure you are not ignoring new opportunities while you’re focused exclusively on the “closing” end of the funnel. You need to spend time in each stage to get the most out of your produce.

Stick with this more balanced approach to your selling activities and you’ll create a more balanced sales funnel. You’ll have some nice green bananas, some delicious yellow ripe ones – and yes, hopefully, you’ll also be making lots of bread!

1. “Salespeople make too much of their sales process, and sales managers too little. Having a sales process and not using it is the same as not having a sales process. It means you aren’t following your best practices for stacking the deck in your favor, and there is no reason not to do so.”
2. “Salespeople aren’t avoiding the sales process; they’re avoiding asking for and obtaining the commitments that they need and that are embedded in the sales process.”

Are you leveraging and repeating your best sales cycles into all sales cycles?  Are you gaining the commitments from your clients early in the sale to ensure a higher close ratio? 

These are questions that we can all benefit from reviewing.

Give this post, “A Sales Process in Peril,” a read and become a subscriber.  Anthony always has great information!

Miller-Heiman’s Strategic Selling was a ground-breaking sales methodology that like Neil Rackham’s S.P.I.N. Selling has influenced almost all thinking on the subject since it was introduced.  In the Strategic Selling methodology, a key tenant was thinking about selling through the eyes of the buyer broken down by role or “buying influence.”

The epiphany of this model included:

1. “Selling” should really be looked at through the buyer’s eyes.  This was revolutionary and still remains a challenge in some organizations.
2. The single-sale-to-single-buyer paradigm is no longer relevant.  Buying is done by a group, either in organized or loosely federated teams.  This is a truth to this day, arguably accelerated by the internet and social media providing the opportunity for buyers to be more educated than ever, and instilling a drive to have a voice in collaborative decision-making.
3. These teams had various roles, and the roles could be grouped into common types with common business priorities:
1. Economic: The one buyer with $ authority
2. User: The person or people who will interact with the solution on a daily basis.
3. Technical: the person or people who will need to deeply understand the solution or do the care and feeding.
4. Coach: An active fan of your solution, who will help you sell it into their organization.
4. The salesperson should incorporate this into the sales strategy.

If you’re still looking at selling from the inside out, and think you have one buyer per sale, it is a very valuable exercise to dust off your copy of this book (or get digital and download it to your Kindle) and do a gut check. 

You’ll be glad you took the time to sell under the influence!

But if you are like most organizations, I would wager that you and your sales team have a natural tendency to “shoot at anything that moves.”

Acting with the discipline to treat opportunities differently depending on their qualification can pay huge dividends as a return on organizational effort.

We all have a limited set of differentiated offerings.  It is also true that available time for selling is tighter than ever before.  So it makes the manner in which you identify, qualify, and pursue opportunities a higher stakes game than ever before.

In his re-creation of Michal T. Bosworth’s concepts in The New Solution Selling, author Keith M. Eades draws one key distinction that can be helpful in sorting the wheat from the chaff.  The image above is a modified version of the “Solution Selling Process Flow Chart Model.”  In it you will notice that opportunities fall into two types: “Latent,” where the client is not actively looking, but your solution is a strong fit; and “Active,” where the client is looking for a solution to a specific problem, and your solution may be a strong fit. 

You can quickly sort opportunities at your firm into these two types as one way to triage potential pursuits and if/how you are going to manage them.

Sales to Latent opportunities are typically longer (more nurturing, education and collaboration with clients) but also generate less competition and more profit per deal.

Sales to Active opportunities need to be scrutinized (what is our unique win strategy?  What is our profit position? Should we pursue?) but are often a faster path to closure.

The challenge is not to develop the perfect process, but to begin to differentiate the way in which you engage on pursuits. 

Interesting things will happen when you do.   Your hit rate should increase,  you should see a higher return on your effort, and people on your team will begin to feel that you are playing to win.

If you are in marketing, you should get a baseline on it. You should understand the +1 ramifications to your paid and natural search.

Here is a great summary from Smart Insights (http://www.smartinsights.com)

My favorite implication mentioned in the article is that Google +1 offers “social proof” to search – analogous to Facebook ”likes.”