Today, there’s a tool for everything. Technology is helping us find deals faster, and expediting necessary steps of the sales process so they close quicker. Most of them integrate into your CRM where you can access the information. Even still, you may need to be a Salesforce guru in order to piece it all together and there is no way everyone feels 100% confident that all the technology ties together seamlessly.
Sales reps and sales executives both found TopOPPS’ opportunity specific updates very intuitive. Sales managers and sales executives thought the reporting within TopOPPS quickly and easily provides them with significant pipeline visibility.
Internally, you are familiar with the Expected Close Date (sometimes simply referred to as Close Date) that sales reps keep updated. Sometimes a sales team can have difficulty keeping these dates accurate; perhaps simply because of the volume of deals occurring, or because predicting the future is hard!
Working with sales leaders who struggle with understanding the true state of the deals in their pipeline is an every day occurrence for my team and I. Many rely on information from their sales reps through phone calls, emails and meetings to gage how individual deals are progressing along combined with hours of digging through CRM data.
TopOPPS’ forecasting methodology has a singular, core belief: People are different, and there is no one-size fits all. We can stop flying blind through the quarter if our forecasts worked for each rep.
When I train sales manager to use TopOPPS, many want to focus on how to use TopOPPS for their one-on-one meeting with their sales reps. It’s my experience that sales managers fall into two general camps when it comes to prepping for their one-on-ones: managers will spend time in their CRM gathering data or managers will not prep for their meetings and “wing it”.
A sure-fire method to extend the sales cycle, add confusion to the forecast, and lose more deals is to have an inconsistent sales process.
With championship season wrapping up, I thought it would only be appropriate to highlight the universal characteristics of a championship team. However, I won’t talk about the underperforming ‘superstar stacked’ Cleveland Cavaliers or even the perpetual championship-winning Chicago Blackhawks (Go Blues!). I’m going to talk about a team that eclipses them both: the Barden Bellas.
If you haven’t heard of them, then you probably aren’t familiar with Pitch Perfect, or the theater release of its sequel Pitch Perfect 2. Quick overview: it’s a movie about an all-woman a cappella group that crushes it. Why is that relevant? Because finding an a cappella group that has members who match each other flawlessly is much harder than putting together any championship sports team, in my opinion.
So, with that in mind, I want to share three characteristics about the Barden Bellas that are crucial parts of building an all-star team:
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