In my recent post Getting More Out of Your CRM I touched on the format of the weekly sales meeting, saying that you should address all early-stage “Interested” opportunities as a whole, asking if there’s anything new with any of them, but I didn’t exactly say WHY you should not devote time to drilling down into each opportunity. 

It’s my belief that the single most prevalent — and therefore most costly — mistake in all of sales is to mistake interest for intent and apply resources to trying to close an early-stage opportunity — something that’s still a long way from closing. 

In the creative world that means cranking up the pitch machine. In other expert practices it means writing proposals that don’t get acted upon (you don’t hear no and you don’t hear yes — because there’s no decision to be made). 

It’s okay to have a pipeline filled with such early-stage opportunities. The law of averages states that you will. But you shouldn’t weight these opportunities with the same significance or urgency, which is what you do by implication when you review each early-stage opportunity in detail. 

One of the seemingly innocuous but counterproductive things that leaders do in these meetings is to ask questions like “What’s the status of [some early stage “Interested” opportunity]?”

I’m not saying you shouldn’t get status updates but a common scenario is the salesperson is giving the prospect the time and space they’ve asked for before following up, but the salesperson’s boss asks for a status update. The salesperson is then told something that implies the reason this deal isn’t moving forward is lack of action on their part.

Sometimes that’s true, but far more often the expert salesperson knows that more action on their part will cause the prospect to retreat, to demote the expert to “needy vendor” status in their mind and decrease the likelihood of a sale, now and over the long term. 

Scott Edinger’s book The Growth Leader talks about the poor behavior driven by such seemingly innocuous questions, behavior that ultimately forces the business off strategy. (This is why Edinger says sales is where a business’s strategy goes to die.)

I’ve seen the look in the salesperson’s eye when their manager tells them to follow up again when they know it’s the wrong move. I’ve seen the ignorance in the eye of the manager who thinks they can cajole a salesperson into moving an opportunity forward because, well, it’s an opportunity and that’s what salespeople do — move opportunities forward. 

Consider the next inappropriate follow-up you get from an annoying salesperson and ask yourself if this behavior might be the result of their boss asking for an update or suggesting they follow-up again.

Then ask if you might be driving the same behavior in your own organization.

-Blair