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How do you get your sales team to see a month or two ahead when on a Monthly quota?
As we near the midway point of Q4, I'm wondering how others are getting their teams to continue focusing on closing November business while shifting focus to starting December quickly? Many times December goes by in a heartbeat with the extended holiday and vacation schedules.
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3 Answers
I am going to build upon something Dave wrote. As a sales leader I have to always remember that what I am interested in my folks will be fascinated by. So I have to be very conscious of what I am interested in. For us we have a cadence that is every other week forecast & pipeline. So every two weeks I am only looking at the pipeline. By pipeline I mean forward pipeline.
As an example, this week I had a pipeline review with each of my sales VP's. In that review we ONLY talked about Q1. What is the size, shape and speed of the Q1 pipe? What are the stuck deals? What are the largest deals and what are the best next actions on the largest deals because if you are not selling to them now, you will not close them in Q1.
If you are the leader of the team and the team only looks at today, not tomorrow...then you have to change what you are interested in.
This is more of a sales management issue. If all management focuses on is current month, then that's the behavior you'll get from the sales people. It's critical that managers look at balanced activity and balanced funnels. It's a mistake to focus all conversation and reviews on monthly activity, but to have a balanced view of the activity, incorporating a longer term view to the business.
Hi Michael,
Dave makes a valid point that I agree with.
What I can add to this is maybe some practical advice. Unfortunately I don't know enough about your company to go into specifics but I can outline some things I've done in the past in similar situations.
First I’m assuming that you are the team leader.
The very first thing I would do is call the sales team into a meeting to explain the situation and why we need to start looking 1-2 months ahead.
Then I would ask the team for their opinions on how looking ahead 1-2 months could practically be done. You might be unaware that some of the team members may have some great ideas.
I would also share a proposal of my own such as having regular meetings on a daily, weekly or bi-weekly basis, with 1-2 month forecast planning on the agenda at every meeting and having the meeting minutes recorded. You may want to have additional forecast planning reports, if you believe it would help.
Then I would try to get the entire team to agree on a proposal, so as to get their commitment and buy-in.
You may be surprised at how easy this can be done. I've seen cases where team leaders or managers hesitate to take certain decisions because they think the team would find it impractical or unacceptable. But after they've involved the whole team in the issue, they were astonished at how many of the team members were thinking along similar lines and actually had some brilliant ideas of their own that they themselves didn’t consider.
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