Building a solid base from which to consistently be able to contact, connect and pull-push prospects into your sales funnel/sales pipeline. The consistent fluid ability to feed your funnel/pipeline and your ability and discipline to maintain balance in your efforts throughout the critical stages of the funnel/pipeline, is essential to consistent sales/closes.

It is critical to have the self-discipline as a professional selling person to understand that the selling process is like a funnel/pipeline with inter-related steps and some will absorb more time than others. In order for a sale to come out of the bottom, there must be ample qualified prospects in the funnel to be contacted. In order for there to be qualified prospects inside the funnel, then suspects must be being contacted above the funnel to be directed into that funnel of activity.

The down fall of most sales professionals is that they don't maintain a consistent level of activity (personal or virtual) at all levels (More than six actual performance steps or layers in the selling funnel/pipeline taught on our PERFORMANCE DRIVEN SELLING™ programs within the "Sales Funnel/Pipeline". Sadly, most view the funnel and work from a feast or famine mentality – Undisciplined sales professionals spend a lot of time at any one level and then they end up rushing and waiting. Recognize that you must spend time each day, week, month on all levels equally – if one expects to make sales calls to prospects, then there must be a proven vetting process to efficiently move from suspects to qualified people that have previous been identified as suspects and placed into the funnel to contact.

Also, understanding your math within the funnel/pipeline model is critical to getting into a rhythm of effectiveness in all that you do!

Evaluate the present customer base to determine how many proposals, contracts or applications you had to process. Evaluate how many prospects had to be contacted for them to matriculate from the number of suspects you had to come into contact with. This reverse analysis will reflect how much work and tome it took to make that one sale.

For each selling professional your Magic-Number™ comes from your actual work product and your effectiveness at understanding the professional selling process and your deliverables as it interfaces with your marketplace. How many contacts at the top of the funnel/pipeline it takes to get a customer out of the bottom?

Again ... How many contacts did it take with any given customer to finally close the order with them and thus matriculate them. Then identify how many suspect contacts did it take to get that one prospect into the funnel, to further work to convert them into a customer. The point here is that the funnel will assist in sharpening your skills in recognizing how many suspects does it take for that sales professional to contact, to qualify them as a prospect, and how many prospect contacts does it take that sales professional to matriculate one sale?

Successful sales professionals invest ample time on a regular basis to feed the funnel, work the funnel and take care of the customers that come out the bottom.

Now, reflect on where you presently find your contacts for each level. Successful sales professionals recognize that their ability to Close a sale is only as good as the prospects that they contact, and those prospects are only as good as the pool of suspects and markets of suspects that they can identify and market, advertise, promote and expose their offer into.

Tell me about your sales funnel. Simply reply to this blog.