Top sales performers proactively drive opportunities through the sales pipeline rather than playing a passive or reactive role. By adopting the habits of top sales performers, salespeople focus on smart, clear milestones at each stage, fostering momentum-building activities and motivating customers to take action.
Top-performing salespeople typically aren’t hard to spot. They’re the ones winning the President’s Club consistently and staying in the top 10% of salespeople throughout their tenure with the company. They will even often turn down opportunities to be promoted to sales manager.
Examining the Habits of Top Sales Performers
The habits of top sales performers include displaying great organizational skills, being strategic thinkers, and proactively seeking out feedback and opinions from others they respect.
Part of how these salespeople stand out from the crowd is their consistency in adhering to critical milestones and tasks for each phase of the sales process. They also fully leverage the sales enablement and marketing tools they’re provided to both aid and challenge their strategic thinking and opportunity planning. These salespeople also consistently set proper expectations with both their customers and sales managers.
In addition, these salespeople display great personal characteristics. They value and genuinely care about the best interests of their customers. They are honest, transparent, and committed to building trusted relationships. They’re viewed as subject matter experts, continually bringing new insights to the table and providing value in every customer interaction.
They ask great questions. And just as importantly, they’re patient and listen intently to the answers, taking time to get to know each member of the buying committee and learning more about their business issues before ever explaining how their solutions are the best choice for the customer.
Even asking a seemingly simple question, “Who will be involved in the decision?” early in the sales process allows them to gain a complete understanding of the key influencers who would be involved in the specific decision-making process; they can then uncover- and even help create- the collective sense of urgency to act now. And these salespeople are able to facilitate dialogues among these internal stakeholders to help create alignment and agreement around the key issues being solved for and the cost of inaction. This helps create a common understanding of the problem among key influencers and the desire to fix it.
The Importance of the Sales Pipeline Process
Simplicity is crucial with sales processes that need to be scaled across large enterprises. An effective sales pipeline process needs to combine simplicity with effectiveness; it’s not only easy to learn and apply, but it is also robust enough to stand up to the day-to-day reality of sales rigors. The challenge that top-performing salespeople face is in thoroughly defining each stage, delineating them from one another, and clearly distinguishing their boundaries.
Our research has proven that when salespeople are held accountable for accomplishing the critical milestones in each stage of the pipeline, they accelerate the pipeline process by 37%. They simply close more business faster.
The building of a well-defined sales process should help your sales team understand, “What comes before what?” More important than fixating on the right number of stages in the sales pipeline is clearly defining each of them in a way that drives the sales team to think and act more strategically and proactively.
The habits of top sales performers allow them to do a better job than other salespeople in truly understanding how a customer makes their buying decision. They are strategic thinkers and have clarity around their customer’s decision process, and how they define the customer’s decision process. This allows the salesperson to validate their understanding of the key influencers and ask their advocates for help on how to neutralize any potential adversaries or skeptics.
Questions Top Performing Salespedople Ask Themselves
These salespeople consistently ask themselves the following three questions:
What’s missing?
A primary aim for any salesperson selling in a complex situation is to ensure they have a full understanding of the customer’s goals and issues. They spend considerable time discussing needs and issues with the customer and gain a solid understanding of the problems the customer is hoping to address.
What goals will be impacted if these problems are solved?
With a little work and a few questions, salespeople are able to link each problem to key metrics and demonstrate how the solution can impact those metrics. They also gain access to new influencers who could be impacted positively by the solution and even create new advocates.
What specific impact can my solution have on your goals?
With a more solid understanding of the customers’ problems and the goals that would be impacted if those problems were addressed, top sales performers demonstrate how well-aligned their solutions are to those goals.
Five Advantages at The Heart of the Habits of Top Sales Performers
Salespeople are clear about what they need to accomplish to keep the customer’s decision process moving forward.
With clear milestones in each stage of the sales pipeline process, salespeople are much more able to assess which milestones have not been achieved for that stage and then develop plans to achieve those
objectives.
It accelerates the sales cycle.
Top salespeople are proactively driving opportunities through the sales pipeline, versus playing a passive or reactive role. Having smart and clear milestones at each stage fosters momentum-building activities because salespeople are motivated to get the customers to take action.
The salesperson and their managers have absolute clarity about where the opportunity is in the pipeline.
An opportunity cannot move into the next stage until it has met all the critical milestones for the previous stage(s). The salesperson can’t promote an opportunity to an advanced stage before its time, so nobody gets false optimism about a deal’s likelihood to close.
Sales managers can quickly identify where a salesperson may need help.
Our research has shown that over 55% of opportunities “stall” in the middle to latter stages of the pipeline process; and what’s more shocking is that over 80% of salespeople blame the customer as to why the opportunity has stalled.
Establishing critical milestones for each stage of the sales pipeline process allows the manager to quickly identify which accounts may be “stuck” in the pipeline. They can collaborate with their salespeople on developing action plans to get the opportunity “unstuck” and moving towards the finish line.
Without milestones in each stage of the pipeline, managers may conduct account reviews with good intentions, but they can’t establish which direction the seller should move to secure the business opportunity.
Establishing clear milestones in each stage of the pipeline process creates a set of forecast metrics that senior sales leaders can rely on.
If senior sales leaders can get their entire team working towards achieving the key milestones throughout the pipeline process, they’ll be more able to establish accurate forecasts that allow the operations, manufacturing and finance departments to make better business decisions for the company. Our research has shown that when managers hold their teams accountable for accomplishing the milestones in each stage, sales forecasting can be improved by 65%.
Bringing It All Together: Converting Needs to Goals
By ingraining the top habits of top sales performers, they are able to successfully close and win more sales because they ask the right questions to learn the identities of everyone who would be influential during the decision-making process and use that information to their advantage. In addition, these salespeople test their strategies with their manager and discover alternative approaches that will end up helping them win more business and earn long-term, valuable customer relationships.
We have found that by going well beyond demonstrating value in monetary terms, and instead broadening the impact of the solution by showing how it could impact a variety of personal, departmental, or corporate goals. As much as we’d like to believe that everyone makes decisions for the good of the company, we know (from our interviews) that people are much more likely to do what’s good for them.
As these habits form and salespeople continue to engage customers in meaningful dialogue and establish trust and credibility, they will learn about problems that exist today (with the existing solution) and problems that could exist tomorrow. They are able to paint a clear picture of the opportunity and to develop effective strategies to improve their customer relationships for years to come.
For any salesperson aspiring to adopt the habits of top sales performers, the question to ask themselves is: Are you going to lose your next sale? Or are you going to invest time in the right accounts, develop your strategic thinking and, ultimately, begin to win more business by successfully following up on the
right opportunities?
The choice is yours.
This blog was developed from original content published in Ignite Your Sales Strategy: A Field Guide to Accelerating Your Pipeline, co-authored by Steve Gielda and Kevin Jones. To contact the authors, contact us today.