The top salespeople we know discover 80 percent or more of the information they need early in the sales cycle and either qualify out or pursue. Mediocre salespeople usually have less than 50 percent of the information late in the game. Coaches help the average salesperson to fill in blind spots and challenge assumptions earlier to gain advantage.

A good coaching session not only can improve the chance of winning, but also improve the forecast as well. The coaching process lies above the sales process and is an “analysis of the analysis” from a more experienced eye.

Our principal, Phil Johnson, has worked with several of our clients to include the front-line sales managers’ analysis and confidence rating in the salesperson’s plan as part of the official forecasting system.

A major flaw in current forecasting philosophy is to multiply the percentage of your chances to win by the value of the deal to get an expected value for the opportunity. This is usually reduced by the manager based on his or her confidence in the rep rather than the analysis. All of the opportunities on the forecast are then combined in the hope that the law of large numbers will get us to a total figure that is somewhere close. In reality, deals are binary. You either lose them or win them.

Phil’s approach of including a confidence rating feedback system from strategy reviews ensures not only that the analysis is being conducted on a periodic basis but also that the forecast reflects the realities of winning rather than a probable expected value for each deal. This is a new way of thinking about a forecast.

There is a symbiotic relationship between good coaching questions and the activities in a best practice sales cycle. The coaching questions are what the salesperson needs to know in order to win the deal. The activities are the things the salesperson needs to do to find out what he or she needs to know.

Answering the questions isn’t about filling out a form — it’s getting the information it takes to win. If your sales management team doesn’t have the discipline to require salespeople to get this information and get it early, then your organization doesn’t have the discipline to win, no matter what technology you use.

Too often coaching is really a “review” of where you are and have been in an account or opportunity. True coaching is discussing blind spots, strategy, and actions to support both accounts and opportunities. A good coach can help a salesperson challenge what he or she doesn’t know or is assuming and then build actions to fill the gaps. A key value that coaches bring to sales reps is to anticipate competitive responses and prepare counterstrategies. Better information leads to a better strategy.

Unfortunately, a large number of deals that are on the forecast have already spun out of control owing to one event or another. Consequently, every pipeline also should include “suspects” so that sales managers can start asking pointed questions and coaching salespeople how to get in control of these deals early in the cycle. This is the difference between a forecast and a pipeline. And this is also where a good CRM system allows sales managers to track lead quality and responsiveness.

Forecast or “Pastcast”—Driving in the Rearview Mirror

Many sales managers don’t review or coach forecast and pipeline opportunities early enough to make a difference because of the current quarterly focus. Public companies’ deals generally don’t get reviewed until the quarter in which they are forecasted to close. If the average sales cycle at a company is six months, the deal is not being focused on until it is in its last 90 days.

Think about how big of an issue this is if the sales cycle is 12 months. This would mean that the deal was ignored by management for nine months! This is aggravated by salespeople who don’t want the manager’s scrutiny on the deal until it is either virtually closed or in trouble.

Every manager should schedule coaching sessions for all pipeline deals, no matter how far out they are. These sessions should occur once during the early part of a quarter, when you can focus more on the long term, and then again when the deal is moving to the next phase of the sales cycle. Or the sessions should happen before each major phase of the sales cycle that requires additional resources (see Figure 7–3).

In addition to a sales planning and communication tool, several other technologies enable effective opportunity management. In the area of competitive intelligence, as part of your knowledge management strategy, it is important to have a repository and a dedicated resource committed to gathering information about specific competitors to equip the field sales force with tactics to respond to competitive traps, objections, messages, and strategies.

One of the first things we do with our clients is work on their competitive sales messaging in four areas: what we say about the competition, what we say about us, what they say about us, and what they say about them. Of course, this is done in a professional manner, but if you know your competitors, you can defeat them at three levels: at the company-to-company level, at the product or solution level, and at the person-to-person level (see Figure 7–4).

Competitive interactions occur every day, but are you learning from them? Some historians say that the Allies in World War II were able to win because, even though they were unprepared, they were able to learn faster from their defeats and failures and more quickly develop new tactics and weapons.

What strategies are the competition using? How have they beaten you recently? When and how did you beat them? What differentiators and tactics are they using?

Gathering this information should not be a haphazard effort. Depending on the size of your company, you may choose to have this done in marketing, or you can outsource it.

Many companies outsource this to firms such as Primary Intelligence, a company with which we partner. Primary Intelligence and firms like it research competitors for their clients, uncovering their strengths and weaknesses and anticipating how they are going to compete against them.

There are also new technologies from companies such as Involve Technology that allow you to glean information from your own people and distribute it in a more efficient manner than many-to-many e-mails.

Involve Technology has a new enabling tool (at the point of this writing) that allows each salesperson in the field to input competitive tactics, messages, traps, objections, and so on on a daily basis, where they are then “scrubbed” by somebody in product marketing for duplication and legal issues and made available instantly to the rest of the company. The key is that this system is driven by a content-sensitive search engine that allows salespeople to find the information they need quickly and efficiently.