Duh - so we are clear what the answer is right? You can’t wait for business to come to you… or pray for serendipity (which was a great movie btw). But you do first need to know where you are and where you are going (according to Alice and Wonderland).
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to go…
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.
HOW DO YOU GET SALES VISIBILITY?
1. You need clear and accurate data. Depending on your world, this may mean tracking how many contacts each of your sales people makes, how many presentations each gives, how many actual sales each makes, and how much revenue each generates.
2. Once you have all of this data gathered, you need a safe place for your team to store the information. Popular options include a spreadsheet, Outlook, salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com) or a CRM.
3. Finally, it is time to analyze your conversion rates in each stage of the sales process, so you not only understand how you got to where you are today, but also are able to discern where to focus in order to drive future sales through the roof.
When you and your team have mastered these three steps, you can say that your organization has sales visibility. Before you get too excited, however, realize that while having visibility is critical in knowing how you got to the present, it does not drive new, future business. To enroll new business at the rate your company deserves, you must understand and master sales predictability. In other words, you need to know how to forecast, accurately, what it takes to get the results you want. For example, let’s say that during the sales visibility exercise you started with 50 prospect leads. Here is what happened to those 50 prospects: • 30 turned into Raw prospects • 20 turned into SMART prospects • 15 turned into Proposal prospects • And you obtained 10 new clients
OK. So the information we now have is historical data, from which we can compute our conversion ratios from one stage to the next (from Raw to SMART, from SMART to Proposal, etc)
How are you tracking the generation of NEW business in your company?