Hey, it’s Mike Cooch here.
I wanted to share a warning with you that I first heard from old man, Dan Kennedy years ago. That is to make sure that you are keeping an eye on your sales prevention department.
Sales Prevention Department
What is sales prevention department?
It’s that culture, people and those stupid things that we do that prevent us from capturing all the sales opportunities that we should.
This has been on top of my mind because I just signed a contract for $3,500 a month. I am paying $3,500 a month to a service provider that in order to actually get that deal done, I called them twice and filled out a form on their website to be contacted by their sales team. And not once did I get contacted by their sales team.
Only because I know that it’s a relatively new business so I know that they are struggling quite a bit. There’s some entrepreneur that is working their tail off and probably doesn’t know that this is happening so I still want to give them a chance.
I felt really inspired to make sure that I actually got in touch with them and gave them the opportunity to earn my business.
So I proceeded to march right into their office and finally got in touch with somebody in sales there that can help me. Thankfully, I ended up doing this deal with them.
But you know, there are some hardworking business owners. I’m a hard working entrepreneur who is investing their life savings, putting everything at risk and has hired some salespeople at this business. And I’m sure that they absolutely have no clue that there are perfectly good opportunities coming in the door that nobody is falling upon.
That’s your sales prevention department.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Unfortunately, not everybody at your business has the same motivation that you do to follow up on deals the way that you do.
So you have to make sure that you have the systems, measurement, process, and the culture in place. You have to make sure that no opportunity gets abandoned without proper follow up.
Which is probably a much more follow up that people are doing right now. Maybe even much more follow up than they realize that they should do unless you’re really instilling that culture in them.
So how do you do that and make sure that you’ve got a dashboard in place? One that can actually measure the proper things?
Wherein you can measure where a deal is in a pipeline that notifies you when new opportunities come in and that you can very clearly see if a salesperson addressed it. “How long has it been?”, “What’s the status of that deal in the pipeline?”, “How long has it been aging in between stages?” Questions like these can be simple measures.
These are all things that a good CRM can do for you, but if you’re not checking on them every day, if you’re not following the metrics, if you’re not following the stats, if you’re not holding daily sales meetings and creating that culture, then you’re just allowing your sales prevention department to grow and thrive.
Don’t let it happen.
