Blog Sale management: a risk of the pipeline review

Many companies organize their sales management around the weekly pipeline review: two hours (sometimes more…) dedicated by the sales team to the examination of live opportunities – often on the basis of reports generated by a CRM software.

 
The risk of this compulsary figure of sales management is that in reviewing each opportunity individually, the sales team loses its view of the pipeline’s general balance.

 
This will often translate into an unwarranted commitment to problem opportunities. Here is why.

• We all have a well-known psychological trait known as loss aversion. On average, to “psychologically” compensate for a loss, we need a gain that is 2 to 2.5 times greater.
• This trait is accentuated by what psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman calls the “isolation error”: the tendency to worry about every individual risk factor without realizing that these factors can neutralize each other.
• And yet for a sales representative, what loss could be crueller, and what risk could be greater than to abandon an opportunity before the prospect has formally declined it?

We therefore wanted to suggest two tricks that may help your sales team overcome its fear of loss and rid its pipeline of the problem opportunities that suck-up resources with little chances of payback.

• Take some time to rethink your pipeline in its entirety, as if it were an investment portfolio. Selling one asset at a loss is painful but allows you to reinvest the proceeds into a more promising one…
• Remind yourself that a sales prospect that prematurely exits your sales pipeline is not completely lost: it is simply recycled to the marketing stage. You must plan specific marketing campaigns for this type of prospect.

 
Good luck!