Helping your team to create more new opportunities

Hello Sales Reset Leader

Would you like your team to create more new opportunities to fill their pipelines?

In this week’s companion Weekly Sales Reset email for front-line salespeople, we focus on creating new opportunities with Compelling Approach Plans.

Your team may include people who have been trained in “high-volume prospecting.” It can be hard to shift this mindset to a focus on “high-quality prospecting”.

The rest of this email newsletter assumes you have read this week’s Weekly Sales Reset“:

• Title: How to Create More New Opportunities with Compelling Approach Plans”

• Subtitle: “Shift your prospecting activity from high-volume to high-quality”.

How to improve your team's results this week

• Evidence of high-quality prospecting

• Recommended coaching session agenda

• Expected pushback about high-quality prospecting

• High-quality prospecting role-play recommendations

• Leadership Reflective Practice

Evidence of high-quality prospecting

Before you lead a sales meeting or coaching session about high-quality prospecting, it will be good to look at the evidence in your CRM or your regular sales reporting:

• How many new opportunities does each team member create daily, weekly, or monthly?

• What is the source of these opportunities?

• How many of your team’s new opportunities are self-generated?

• Is there any correlation between the volume and quality of self-generated opportunities and each team member’s conversion ratios and sales results?

After your team members have read this week’s Weekly Sales Reset, how many have downloaded and used the Compelling Approach Plan template? What is the quality of these plans?

Recommended coaching session agenda

Before leading your coaching sessions on “high-quality prospecting”, ask your team members to review the current edition of Weekly Sales Reset.

Give yourself time to reflect on WIIFM, “What’s in for me,” and empathise with your team members about how they might be sufficiently motivated to improve their prospecting.

Here’s this week’s recommended coaching session agenda:

1. Start with a brief review of their experience and results from their previous coaching session.

2. Ask your team member for their observations about:

   1. Ideal Customer Profiles

   2. Maintaining their Prospecting List

   3. Compelling Approach Plans

   4. Having a prospecting mindset

3. Together, review the evidence you found in your preparation with each team member.

4. Identify and prioritise a small range of specific practical things that this team member can do differently and better to improve their prospecting.

5. Spend some time role-playing with the recommendations below (working with these guidelines).

6. Finish the coaching session with agreed and specific action conclusions.

Expected pushback about high-quality prospecting

So you know what to expect and can be prepared, here are three areas of possible pushback from your team members on the theme of high-quality prospecting.

1. Time: High-quality prospecting is time-consuming. If some of your team members have more experience with high-volume prospecting, they may have concerns about “putting all their eggs in one basket” with highly targeted prospecting. How will you help them to make the transition from high-volume to high-quality prospecting?

2. Confidence: Compelling Approach Plans are ideally developed by confident, assertive and highly experienced market sector specialists. Your team members might not currently have this level of confidence. How can you help them develop sufficient confidence?

3. Procrastination: Team members will quickly realise that once they start looking, there’s no end to the research they can do before approaching a prospect. This might lead to a poor balance of quality and quantity of approaches. How will you help them get this balance right?

Now you’re aware of these areas of potential pushback, what are your best responses?

High-quality prospecting role-play recommendations

1. Reaction to a Compelling Approach Plan: Take one of your team members’ Compelling Approach Plans and role-play the approach and reaction from the customer.

2. Asking to be introduced: This role-play involves approaching somebody else to introduce you to the key person you want to meet. Examples include approaching an existing customer or a colleague of the person you want to approach and asking to be introduced.

3. What will success feel like? Explore how it will feel to always have a surplus of high-quality opportunities because of the sustained effort in prospecting. Role-play two performance review meetings. In one meeting, your team member is struggling because of insufficient opportunities in their pipeline. In the second scenario, their challenge is reluctantly de-prioritising lower-quality opportunities because of everything they’re working on. In what ways are these two situations different?

(You may find these recommendations about using role-play helpful.)

Leadership Reflective Practice

At the end of this week, ask yourself these key questions:

We hope you’ve found this edition of Sales Reset Leaders valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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