Growing an Effective Pipeline - WORK SMART!

Hi Folks - well it's been a while (actually nearly a year) since I last provided an update - I have been busy with a new job that I began at IBM and haven't had a chance to update my blog.  So, I'll start off on working to towards this:

Replenish your pipeline

It's all coming down to the last wire - it's the end of quarter and every sales rep is worried about how the quarter is going to end.  In the tough North American  economy which grows at a very slow pace sales growth is a hard thing to come by as you are focused on closing.  Too many of us forget to replenish our pipeline so we can ensure continuous sales growth for the future quarters.  

This is easier said than done - but why is that?  Well - a lot has to do with where you are in the economy.  Is your product what I call a mature product in a mature economy?  Or is it a cutting edge product in an emerging economy?  What do they mean?  

Mature vs. Emerging Economy

Well, mature economy is one that would be classified as a developed one averaging growth rates of approximately 1-3% per year whereas an emerging economy would be one that would be getting more than 5% growth per year.   Examples of a mature economy are Canada, United States, Japan, etc.  while an emerging economy would be Indonesia, China, India, etc.

Mature vs. Up-coming Product

What I would call a mature product is one that has a high percentage of saturation or market penetration - your growth for sales in these would be relatively low.  While a cutting edge product would experience higher growth.  Examples of a mature product would be selling cellphones an upcoming product would be a smartphone.  

Why is this important to know?

Well look at the table below -

New pipeline focus	Cutting edge product	Mature product
Emerging market	Low	Medium
Mature market	Medium	High

Once you know which territory you are calling into (mature or emerging) and the category of the product you are selling (cutting edge and mature) - you can then determine the percentage of time you need to devote on prospecting.  Keep this in mind and try to keep yourself focused.

Good luck and all the best in selling / prospecting!

Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 3

Most organizations (if not all) require the use of a CRM tool - be it for monitoring, organizing accounts, keeping notes, etc. I personal think it was the best creation since sliced bread and have used tools ranging from the ever popular Saleforce.com, Sugar CRM, Siebel, ACT!, Upshot.com (yes I am that old - this was probably one of the first CRM's in the early 2000's), Excel (yes some organizations are that archaic!), etc. The one thing I think all of them are missing is a feature to develop a hierarchy of an organization. So at a quick glance/view, you as the key account manager can quickly know where the person is on the chain of decision making, holding the purse strings, influence, etc. Until that gets invented (or may have but I don't know), I have created a formula of my own to help me manage my accounts.

Organizing your contact lists

This is especially great In complex sales as you tend to speak with multiple people and don't know the interrelationships (matrixed organization).  It gets hard to keep track of who reports to who in the hierarchy, and remembering names of the different people in the organization.  I’ve devised a simple technique that’s easy to implement and if looking at your CRM, you can easily identify who each person is.  I’ll give you an example (sorry for the editing):

	1 - CEO
2A - VP of IT	2B - VP of Sales	2C - VP of Marketing
3A - Director of IT	3B - Director of Sales	3C - Director of Marketing
4A - IT Manager	4B - Sales Manager	4C - Marketing Manager
5A - Systems Administrator	5B - Sales Rep	5C - Intern

The number is the hierarchy within the organization and the letter refers to the department they belong in.  It’s a very easy technique that helps in knowing how senior or junior a person is and the relationship in the hierarchy of the whole organization. I've not assigned a letter to a specific department, but you can implement them as you go - if you know of two people in the organization place these tags on them. I'll show you how I place them:

Name Athar Afzal  
Title: 3B - Director of Sales

Note: Always place it in the first part of the title and not their name. Name because if you sent them an email through your CRM it would show the tag. First part of the title as you read from left to right and it becomes easier to see it first.

Summary of Market Segmentation

I thoroughly enjoyed talking about the topic of the week on market segmentation. Yes, there is a lot of work to do before prospecting, but I believe there is great value in doing this to work less and achieve more. Look forward to comments!

Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 2

 How to find and make a targeted account list (FOR FREE!!)

When you begin to work on expanding your sales pipeline - the first sales technique to implement is to know who to call as this can save you a number of hours of calling and achieving nothing. There are a number of sources you can use to get your lists for free, but before you start - please make sure you have completed the previous tip of identifying your target market.  

Having mostly done B2B sales in Canada, I have retrieved my lists from sources relevant to the Canadian markets, here are a few I have used for the Toronto area:

• Top 1000 public companies - list of companies measured by revenue (you do have other options to try
• Top 350 private companies - look for companies that are 100% owned by one entity or family (ex. Jim Pattison Group, Home Hardware, etc.)
• Scotts Directory - free-trial on-line or you can obtain unlimited use at some Canadian local libraries, employment centers, or municipal business centers.

In addition, for international markets, try these:

• Wikipedia - list of companies listed by categories (ex: geographic regions, industries, etc.), narrow down from that list, or you can simply write "list of companies in __(state region/location)__"
• Linkedin - this link takes you to the 'search companies' tab, you can specify and it will show all the companies registered with linkedin throughout the world. On the left there is a deeper dive where you can narrow by other categories, these are the ones I like: 
• Location - you can be as broad as saying 'United States' to as narrow as a small city like 'Albany, New York, United States'.
• Industry - this is an easy one to select because it will be your target market - like healthcare, education, etc.
• Company Size - really important as are you selling in the SMB or enterprise space.

There are others, namely Jigsaw and Hoover's, which I shall write in a future blog.

General formula for calculating a size of a company

A rule of thumb I use is revenues by companies - typically for every $300MM in annual revenues there are approximately 1000 employees.  I find this to be the most useful statistic than the profit margin or amount of profit made.  You can of course do the math (proportional math? I forget the name) - so if a company claims they have 50 employees - they are probably $15MM in annual revenues.  

Market size is much larger than you think 

There are many other resources you can use to find companies, one thing I’ve always underestimated in any role is the scope of the market is larger than I initially estimated.  That’s probably due to the fact that the developers of products & services are usually not the salespeople (unless they are the founders) they are more the ‘technicians’, who have had experience in their field and made the product/service to overcome those challenges that come in their role.


Thanks - this week I will probably post one more blog - look forward to feedback!

Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 1

Hope everybody had a great weekend (or is having if you are in Canada!) and are pumped up for a great week ahead of opening up new doors of opportunities!  


This week the focus is slightly different than what I have been talking about - on best practices of cold-calling - this week the focus is how to go about preparing your target prospecting list. It’s a beneficial cold-calling technique I have learned that can enable you to do fewer dials for more meetings.  This is also a continuation of a previous blog I had written, which you can view here.

Facing a shrinking prospecting list?

What does this mean? Well - it is a phenomenon I call ‘constant refinement’, which means that as you start to go through your target list, identifying opportunities, it starts to become harder (by law of numbers) to keep finding more opportunities within the same list.  Say you start with a list of 1000 prospects to call, as you dig for the nuggets of gold and find them, the next nugget becomes harder to find as you have started to shrink your base of prospects. So you always have to be on the lookout for new accounts to target.

Let’s start - so the first part of your prospect list is to know who your target audience is.  

Identify your target market and familiarize yourself with it.

In other words - who is and who will be buying my product/service.  This is done by keeping an eye on the trends of your product/service in the marketplace.  What market does your product/service serve best with and are there up and coming new markets that might also benefit from your product/service?  

Find industries to target (low hanging fruit).

You can achieve this by finding out the easiest companies to sell your product / service to (low hanging fruit), then prioritize it to the next 'higher' hanging fruit, and so on.  This helps you as you can start to narrow the time spent learning about your product/service.  If you know have the answer, then start to study that particular industry, current events (news), customer case studies, etc.  


Its this preparation that’s very valuable as when you speak to your prospect, you can always include in your call “...would like to offer you the same as we’ve done with [XYZ customer - someone in their industry]...”.  This third party credibility is very helpful for establishing immediate trust.


Hope this is helpful to eveyone! Look forward to comments or questions.