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One of the biggest lessons that I learnt as an entrepreneur and marketer is to appreciate sales folks. Before you even think of snickering, reflect for moment. Which of us likes being rejected day after day, having to not merely tolerate but cultivate customers with idiosyncrasies you’d never accept in any other person. Add to this being the first person in the line of fire for the products failings and picking up the pieces after an exec or that product marketing guy walks out after lobbing a grenade at a customer meeting – the lot of a sales person is not easy. And if you happen to selling in a brutal market like India, you are ready to be canonized – it is not for the faint of heart. With all that said, if you are a sales person, you might as well be successful, for the pleasure of winning as much for the money.

Dave Brock, in his blog Partners in Excellence, recently spoke of the need for a simple sales process, one that we’d actually follow. Many companies that we work with at Zebu, have a sales process in place, however informal or archaic – even in startups that say they don’t! Yet we find organizations and sales teams struggling – not enough qualified leads, selling cycles taking too long and always, always the pricing pressures. And all this even without the recession. In every one of these cases, we’ve found it useful to go back to the basics. Which in our experience is following three steps, consistently.

1. Weekly review – plan for the week & month ahead
2. Daily execution – relentlessly work  your A, C and B lists
3. Sales Pipeline & Process – written SMART and living pipeline

1. Weekly Review
Twice a week, preferably on Friday evenings and Tuesday mornings, sit down to review your sales pipeline. Ideally with the whole sales team, if there’s less than 8 folks, in person (at least on Fridays) and plan for the week ahead. Typically we find reviewing by deal size and by sales person, what orders you’re likely to book, a good place to start. The review of what you will

• book that week (List A),
• book that month (List B) and
• be adding to your hopper (List C)

On Friday (or Saturdays if you work six days) before you go for that beer or break, having a plan for the week ahead helps. It allows the team to celebrate any wins they’ve had and more importantly recover from a bad week or big loss and focus on the future.

Tuesday mornings, leaves all of Monday to execute, without meetings and provides a chance to make any tweaks to Friday’s plan if there’s been any unforeseen changes or to put out any fires that may have popped up. It helps the sales manager figure out who or which deal might need help and what he needs to focus on as well. The two things the weekly review helps you do are

1. create a focused plan for the week/month ahead
2. understand and adjust for things that didn’t play out the way you reckoned the previous week

2. Daily Execution
This is the most critical step – the relentless daily doing. Start your day early, and work it in the order A, C, B – namely chase the important deals you plan to close that week, your List A. Do whatever is necessary for the first one on our A list. Don’t take your eye of the one you are  working on till you close it or get it to a logical decision point. Then move on to the second one on your A list and so on. Once done with your A list, then work your way through the C list – leads – generating, qualifying and moving them forward rather than on the B list. Some folks prefer to even sneak a few of the C list items between completing their A list items.

Most of us have , taught to work things in an A, B and then C order. And starting with the A list makes sense for all the logical reasons. However, given sales is a numbers game, if you don’t work through your C’s first, they’d never get any time on your calendar. Sooner or later your pipeline is going to run dry – even if marketing is doing lead generation for you, if you don’t build up a strong C list than can feed your B list. Work your B list, after you have done your share of C list pursuit. Again we’ve seen successful sales folks put in one hour (or two) each day into their Cs before moving on to the B. Alternately folks have done, so many C calls each day, before handling their B list. Regardless of how you work your actual day, the take away is ensure that no day goes by without your working your C list, regardless of the number of As or Bs you have on your plate.

3. The Sales Pipeline
Just as a CFO or controller would know (good ones always do), what their cash situation is at any time and where & when the big inflows or outlays will happen, every sales person should have a written down sales pipeline. This could be the one you created on the fly, at that first weekly meeting on a white board or a sheet of paper or good ol’ Excel. Or one that your sales manager has assiduously pulled together in your company’s fancy CRM tool. Either way it is a start. However rough or accurate your first sales pipeline is, the weekly reviews and daily execution, will clean it up pretty quick.

The important thing in your sales pipeline is to capture a finite set of specifics, that will help you slice & dice the data you have. These specifics are essentially your “sales process.” The sales process has only one purpose – to empower each sales person to accomplish their goals, in the shortest possible time on the best possible terms. It it allows the management to plan, forecast and help the sales team achieve their objectives, all the better.

Regardless of which step you start with, when executed consistently, these three steps will act to create a virtuous cycle, that will help you start selling better today.