Telemarketing Software Featured Article

You know what ABC means. Always be closing.

How about AHSF?

No? That’s OK. I just made up that one.

But the letters do stand for something. And that is: a healthy sales funnel.

Closing deals, and thus earning commissions and potentially other perks, is the ultimate goal of sales people. But it’s tough to keep the good times rolling if there’s nothing in the works once you reel in the big fish.

That said, it’s ideal to have various small and large deals in the pipeline at all times. And a recent VanillaSoft blog from Josiane Feigon, president of TeleSmart Communications, explains how to populate your sales funnel for future success.

Feigon suggests that organizations and their salespeople add at least five new qualified opportunities to their pipelines every week. “Your pipeline should have at least 40 percent of new business opportunities each month,” she adds.

Strengthening the pipeline by gaining a better understanding of what prospects are looking for, prioritizing leads, eliminating those that show very little potential to buy (but, she says, don’t be too aggressive in getting rid of those who have said no in the past; instead, take an analytical approach to this), and including some smaller deals that could grow larger over time are also key ways businesses can build healthy sales funnels, she adds.

“Don’t deep clean, deep qualify,” she says. “When there are so many leads clogging up the funnel, reps tend to focus more on qualifying something out rather than qualifying them deeper.”

One way to do that is by asking more questions. Feigon suggests that salespeople ask prospects and customers about their business needs, their competitors, their current environments, the factors they consider in making decisions, their budgets, their timelines, and their next steps.

“Salespeople who do this find they have a stronger and more focused funnel,” she says.